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UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA. 



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Temperance Leaflets; 

B O R R ( ) W K D P A G K S 



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LERGYMAN'S MANUSCRIPTS 



By Rev. William H. Fonerden, M. D. 

Chaplain Friendship Division, No. 103, S. of T. 



. 



NEW YORK: 

fctJBLIBHED BY 1 II L AUTHOR, 

1870. 






Entered according to Act of Confess, in the year 1870, by W. H. FONERDEX, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



This little volume is not, as might perhaps be supposed from 
the subtitle, made up of gleanings from other writers, but is com- 
posed of selections from the author's own manuscripts: in these, 
however, he has not hesitated to avail himself of the thoughts of 
more gifted minds, and even, in a very few instances, of their 
language ; believing that, since the original conceptions of exalted 
genius are of far greater worth than the words in which they find 
utterance, if he may appropriate, without rebuke, that which is of 
most, he may surely use that which is of least, value. The present 
publication owes its birth to numerous requests — some by those 
who heard the sermons and lectures from which the prose articles 
are taken, and others by those who have obtained a peep at the 
metrical contents of his portfolio — to issue them in book form. 
While he declines just now the publication of any of his works in 
full — several, indeed, being yet incomplete — he nevertheless so far 
complies with the wishes of friends, especially among the Sons of 
Temperance, the Good Templars, and the Good Samaritans, with 
all of which Orders he has the honor to be connected, as to cull and 
arrange these Leaflets for the press, in the sincere hope, and 
with an earnest prayer, that they may prove eminently serviceable 
in the cause of Temperance. 
38 West Fifteenth Stkeet, 

>'ew York City, July 15, 1870. 



CONTENTS. 



1 . THE SUCCESSFUL Candidate; Or The First Election Gained by Treatin ' 
g. Harvest Home : An Autumn Picture. 

3. ANTIQUE ANNALS OF TOTAL ABSTINENCE. 

4. LOVE vs. LIQUOR : A Midnight Scene. 

5. woman's Wrongs and Woman's Work. 

6. WINE vs. Woman; Or The First Invasion of Woman's Rights. 

7. ravages of the rum fiend. 

8. the prisoner to a moonbeam.— the demon exorcised.— the morj 

freedman. 

9. the great law of expediency. 
10- the north-easter.— the family cup.— the dupe of fashion. 
11. cheer of the wine cup. 
12- a rechabite vow. — sober reflections. —nature's beverage. 

christmas carol. 

13. The Imminent Peril of our Nation. 

14. The Temperance Banner: A Fourth of July Ode for Sous of Tempi 
ance.— Cadets' National Song.— Youths' jubilee Chaunt. 

15. Vital Statistics of Temperance: An Essay on Longevity. 

16. THE Drunkard's Legacies: A Spectacle of the Death Chamber. 



TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS, 



ISOKKOWED PAGES FROM A CLERGYMAN'S MANUSCRIPTS. 



Jhc gwmM ®m&ifattt, 

OR THE FIRST ELECTION GAINED BY TREATING. 



The worst feature of the unholy liquor traffic is, that it not 
mly saps the foundations of all private virtue, but also 
shakes to their very bases the pillars of our noble republican 
institutions. 

Youth may assume the momentous responsibilities of 
:ife with aspirations lofty as the exalted patriotism of Wash- 
ington ; with purpose pure as the spirit of Calhoun ; with 
mergy indomitable as the swerveless determination of 
Jackson ; with intellect unclouded as the perspicacious mind 
of Webster; with eloquence impassioned as the silvery sen- 
tences of Clay; with hopes blooming as the rose gardens 
A Persia; with prospects bright as the sunrise landscape of 
Italy; yet over all, dalliance with the wine cup will shed 
i blighting mildew, fatal as the poisonous exhalation of the 
Upas. 

Oh, who can gaze, even in imagination, on the wreck of 
)iir country's glory, without feeling- all hope of man's ele- 



6 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

vation to his destined sphere die within him? Over the 
chaos that marks the site of ancient Troy may be written, 
"lliumfuit" above the reeking ruins where once Carthage 
stood may be read the epitaph of her fallen grandeur, in 
the long past fulfilment of the prophetic denunciation, "De- 
lencla est Carthago ;" Greece may have yielded her instable 
democracy to the arrogant demands of the Macedonian 
conqueror: Eome, the once proud mistress of the world, 
may have bowed her republican neck to the imperial sceptre 
of Octavius: the Goddess of Liberty may seem to have 
grown delirious in the days of the first French Republic, 
under the conjoint rule of the bloody Robespierre and the 
execrable Marat: and yet/ amid all these political convul- 
sions, the normal principles of liberal government have sus- 
tained no annihilating shock : but when our constitutional 
franchises come to be regarded as worthless baubles, and 
the confederate powers of these United States sink under 
corrupting influences, then, indeed, will the deep grave of 
Freedom be dug, with walls more durable than the rock 
ribbed sepulchre of Arimathea, and cerements more bind- 
ing than those of Egyptian sarcophagi. Then may the 
world weep over the corpse of murdered Liberty, and in 
vain endeavor to woo back her manes from the Stygian 
gloom, where she will have found refuge from the civil 
revolutions of earth. 

Are there no murky clouds looming up in the firmament, 
presaging the approach of this dire calamity? Doth no 
furious gale, or heaving surge, threaten to cast the gallant 
argosy of State upon a lee shore ? Alas, the distant hori- 
zon grows black with darkness as the cave of Engedi. The 
low mutterings of the coming tempest are heard,"and the 
white capped crests of nearing breakers seen. Already 
serpent tongued lightnings wildly play around the mast- 
head; and the Palinuri of the nation tread a slippery deck, 
wet with the fearful spray. 



THE SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE. ( 

Go, examine the loathsome annals of the ballot box, and 
there read the prostitution of the elective 4 franchise, and the 
prospective demolition of popular sovereignty, through the 
prevalence of intemperance in the laud. Where is the free- 
dom of voluntary selection, and the liberty of uncontrolled 
decision, which alone can subserve the hallowed purpose of 
our electoral rights ? Where the stern integrity of patriotic 
principle, and the noble independence of unbiased suffrage ? 
Ah me, an exalted birthright is too often sold for a less 
price than the lentil pottage of Esau, and political honesty 
bartered for a more corrupt bribe than the traitor purse of 
Arnold. As was once the temple of God converted by 
money changers into a den of thieves, so now the polls 
too often becomes the grand bazaar of the rum broker; 
while the bottled wage of the hireling voter proves the 
danming pay of Judas, urging him headlong upon his doom. 
The grog shop is the league chamber of the Powers of 
Darkness, and the treaty of alliance, sealed with the raven 
signet of Death, is the bond deed of the soul's enslavement, 

If the substitution of gold by Lysander for the iron cur- 
rency of Lycurgus sapped the government of Lacedaemon, 
and erected the thrones of thirty Jy rants over degraded 
though luxurious Athens, surely the more debasing prac- 
tice of controlling elections by the free distribution of 
spirituous liquors, must eventually work the destruction of 
our model institutions; while those who pursue so nefarious 
a course, like the sixty conspirators against Csesar, inflict 
the death wounds of their country's weal. 

Even now, through the venality of factious demagogues 
and subsidized electors, our senate chambers, representa- 
tive halls, cabinet councils, and electoral colleges — in fine, 
all our offices, from the bailiwick of a militia district to the 
gubernatorial chair of a sovereign State, and, indeed, to 
the chief magistracy of the nation — have become sordid 
commodities of a contraband traffic; and unless the deeply 



8 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

contaminating custom of treating at elections be speedily 
and utterly abolished by the moral sense of an enlightened 
people, the ballot box will ere long prove the grave of our 
country's honor ; the register of votes, a record of national 
infamy; and an American's warrant of citizenship, the 
world's writ of attainder against him. 

In all the pages of history, sacred or profane, but an iso- 
lated instance of this method of undermining the freedom 
of a people stands on record; and as that case, hi its lament- 
able results, demonstrates how irreconcilably antagonistic 
to the welfare of society and the stability of government is 
the practice; of treating, I will narrate it for the benefit of 
all concerned. 

This deplorable event occurred in the annals of a land 
teeming w T ith such luxurious productions as a genial sun, 
ever seasonable rams, and an exhaustless soil, could not 
fail to yield: the rich boons of a munificent Providence. 
The atmosphere, equally removed from the wintry rigor of 
Siberia and the fevered breath of Ethiopia, and rivaling in 
softness the air of Vallambrosa, bore on every zephyr the 
spicy odors of Ceylon. Every embowered vale was vocal 
with notes of choicest melody, sweeter far than the vespers 
of the Persian Bulbul. An architect more sldllful than the 
Grand Master Hiram Abyff, had fixed ha place the keystones 
of a thousand gorgeous palaces, each as far transcending in 
grandeur the magnificent temple which constituted the 
glory of Solomon and the wonder of Sheba's queen, as that 
surpassed the mosque of St. Omar or the Moorish Alham- 
bra. In fact, this delightful country seemed a miniature 
fac simile of heaven itself; and the fabled Elysium of the 
poets appears to the mind's eye its photographic represent- 
ation. 

An election for chief ruler w r as pending, on the choice of 
whom hung the fortunes of an entire race and the destiny 
of a mighty empire. As it approached, one of the cancli- 



TIIE SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE. i> 

dated] there being only two, entertained well grounded fears 
of defeat, and bethought him of corrupting the polls. With 
all the craft of the unscrupulous politician, he treated the 
electors, who had theretofore been illustrious for their 
profound wisdom and unsullied virtue ; and when the ballot 
was numbered, the doleful news rang through startled 
Eden, that Jehovah's supremacy w T as repudiated, and Satan 
had been chosen "the god of this world!" 

(The only and immaterial difference is, that the devil 
treated Adam and Eve with the apple itself, while modern 
candidates treat with apple-jack, or some equivalent. I 
leave them to make application of the incident. ) 

A* 



Wwmt Wmnt: 



AX AUTUMN PICTURE. 



Come, gen'rous Ceres, thine assistance yield 
To draw a moral from the harvest field : 
To sing how winds of March and April showers, 
With bright eyed May's gay livery of flowers, 
Have passed away; and how the summer's sun, 
Throughout his maturative orbit run, 
Green fields hath ripened— now, to harvest white— 
Which wave as if the reaper they invite 
To garner, as reward of faithful toil 
Bestowed in season on the fertile soil : 
How bending culms, with full eared, golden top. 
In well laid swath before the cradle drop ; 
And how they next are bound in sightly sheaves, 
While gleaners gather what the binder leaves : 
How well fed teams transport each precious load, 
Without the use of painful lash or goad, 
Their merry drivers whistling time away, 
Or singing, as they trudge, some rustic lay: 
And how, when in capacious barns is stored 
The summer's bounty for the winter's hoard, 
Vocif 'rous crowds make nature's azure dome 
Resound with jocund shouts of " Harvest Home ! ; 

Now Phoebus, vertical, pours down his rays, 
From flaming disc, in unremitting blaze. 
T*he panting ox, with nostrils stretching wide, 
And dog, that seeks the wagon's shady side, 
Their throats all parching with pervading drought, 
From open mouths their slav'ring tongues thrust out. 
Domestic fowls, within the poultry yard, 
Feel, as they scratch, the glowing ground grow hard : 
With feathers ruffled, lo, they droop their wings. 
And ev'n the bird with husky cadence sings. 

But Nature, provident in all her ways, 
Mid summer heat? her kindness still display- ; 



HABVEST HOME, 11 

And from beneath yon mass of gray browed rocks, 
For plodding teamster and for patient ox, 
For harvesters aweary with their toil, 
And strong- limbed horse that draws the golden spoil. 
For dairy maid and for her lowing kino, 
For panting dog and ever grunting swine, 
For knighted chanticleer and cackling hen — 
In line, for all, or fowls, or boasts, or men, 
Whose limbs relaxed seem swaling fast away 
Beneath the fierceness of the torrid day- 
Gush crystal waters, sweet as those which burst 
From Meribah's bald crag for Israel's thirst. 

From cup and gourd how eagerly is quaffed, 
By arid lips, the more than nectared draught, 
While youths and maidens, in a happy group, 
With rustic grace around the fountain stoop 
Their sun browned hands and dust grimed brows to lave, 
Where willows o'er the curling ripples wave. 
They drink again, and yet again they fill 
Their home made goblets from the bubbling rill ; 
Yet no undue excitement of the brain, 
No maudlin merriment or word profane, 
No double vision and no bloodshot eyes, 
From princely revels such as these, arise. 
No lumb'ring footsteps and no nerves unstrung, 
No hiccups, stopping short the thickened tongue, 
No throbbing temples and no nauseous qualm, 
Requiring further stimulus to calm, 
Are found w T ithin the pebble basined stream, 
Whose flashing spray drops like a diamond gleam : 
? Tis bliss indeed to sip its pearly foam, 
And sing in unison the Harvest Home. 



Ah, had this charming picture no reverse, 
Zse'er then the world had known the bitter curse 
Too oft extracted from the boons effused 
By God's munificence— by man abused. 
Full many a tear that now unbidden flows 
Beneath the weight of cumulative woes, 
Again its hiding place would gladly seek, 
Nor trickle down pale Sorrow's furrowed cheek : 
Full many a voice now tuned to painful notes, 
And— if at all— which but in sadness floats, 
Again would breathe into the list'ning ear 
The seraph music once it loved to hear : 
Full many a heart with bitter anguish wrung, 
Down to its core by perfidy now stung, 
Again would pulsate as in joyous youth, 
\vi\.M) life wa love, and Elope's gay dreams were trathi 



12 TEMPERANCE LEAFLET*. 

Alas, for poor humanity's disgrace ! 
The lore of Araby hath taught our race 
To gender, with too fatal cheruic skill, 
Toffana waters from the seething still, 
"Whose fumes, more deadly than the Delphic cave 
Of old poured forth, men may not scathless brave. 
As if no Upas e'er, in Java's clime, 
Its poison shed to punish Eden's crime ; 
As if from forest depths of dark Peru 
No savage art woorara ever drew ; 
As if no arrow dipped in manchineel 
In Indian warfare served the stead of steel ; 
As if with toxicologists were rare 
The deadly nightshade and the foxglove fair, 
Perverting man, with sordid greed of gain, 
Distils rank poison from his choicest grain. 

Where yonder mountain frowns with sullen brow. 
Its rock ribbed sides defiant of the plough, 
A dingy building, crouching at its base, 
Stands like the Tyburn of the savage place. 
Thick cobwebs curtain all its windows o'er, 
And bane exuding vines festoon the door, 
Whence lead, in mock Daedalian order laid, 
Paths serpentine, by reeling footsteps made : 
Its furnace chimneys belch a pitchy stream 
Of smoke, commingled with the cauldron's steam : 
Fermenting swill tubs noisome odors blend 
With alcoholic fumes, which thence ascend : 
Alas, that e'er beneath its blackened dome 
Are housed the products of the Harvest Home. 

About the entrance stands a motley crowd. 
In ribald mirth their voices ringing loud. 
With napless hats on unkempt heads aslouch, 
And vestments might adorn the scaramouch. 
Each ready seems for any menial turns, 
If, as reward, the thirst with which he burns 
He may but quench from that empoisoned rill. 
Which gurgles from the worm of yonder still. 

Not long they wait ; for soon a rumbling wain. 
O'erpiled with bulging bags of new threshed grain. 
Its greaseless wheels loud screeching with the haste 
Its owner makes his staple crop to waste. 
Is backed up opposite the mouldy door, 
With charcoal portraits sketched grotesquely o'er : 
And each one of that Merry Andrew throng- 
Hushed, for the nonce, the jest and laugh and song-* 
Helps cheerfully the wagon to unload, 
In hope another dram will be bestowed ; 



HARVEST HOME. 1". 

While Btillhonse hands receive the fresh supply 
< >f golden wheat or barley, corn or rye, 

And into whiskey change what should form food 
For all that lazy, worthless] drunken brood. 

Oh, worse than loss— aye, worse than wanton waste. 

To pamper thus a brutalizing: taste, 
Whose cravings, sateless as the grave worm's maw. 
Cry ever to the chuckling tapster, draw ! 
And, oh, what fatal folly 't is to think 
Such thirst to quench by oft repeated drink ! 
^ ith oxygen, go, smother iEtna's flame : 
With draughts of blood the starved hyaena tame ; 
In ocean depths Leviathan, go, drown ; 
With chains of iron bind the lightning down ; 
Then, this accomplished, dupe of Bacchus ! drain 
Thy oft filled chalice, but to learn how vain 
All efforts are— as well the last as first— 
With liquid fire to stay thy burning thirst. 

The grower, maker, and the vendor, all 
Seem madly lab'ring under Mammon's thrall. 
That thus regardless of the drunkard's woes, 
As if, indeed, he ranked among their foes. 
They draw from what were else Sk the staff of life." 
As from a sword cane, the assassin's knife, 
And while they hold it to the victim's throat, 
Strip him, at once, of bread, and purse, and coat. 
He and his offspring then in want may roam, 
While they grow joyful o'er their Harvest Home I 



SUttipe SUnals of Eotat Jpstincnr^ 



Notwithstanding the intrinsic evidence of its excellency, 
and the current record of its usefulness, many otherwise 
philanthropic persons object to identifying themselves with 
the cause of temperance as now organized, under the 
mistaken idea that it is of modern origin, and, consequently, 
a mere human innovation upon the divinely ordained 
system of moral instrumentalities. Let us therefore devote 
a few 7 moments to the task of tracing back its annals to 
the remotest period of history : and here I may remark, by 
way of preliminary observation, that we shall find the 
principle of total abstinence among the oldest institutions 
of the world ; holding intimate connection with the peculiar 
polity of the ancient Hebrews, through the ritual of the 
Mosaic dispensation, and employed by Jehovah himself as 
a means of vast moral power hi moulding, and preserving 
from the estranging influence of animal appetite, the 
religious character of his chosen people. 

The circumstances which originally developed the 
principle of total abstinence as a rule of life were truly 
appalling. Briefly narrated, they are these : 

Moses had descended from audience with Jehovah; and, 
at the yet rocking base of Sinai, the tabernacle had been 
constructed, and an altar reared. Aaron had offered the 
first holocaust of his sacerdotal service. Nadab and Abihu 
had kindled their censers with strange fire; but scarce had 
the fames of their inaugural ministration reached the 



ANTIQUE A\NU>- or TOTAL ABSTINENCE. 10 

nostrils of Deity, ore "there went out a lire from the Lord, 
and devoured them." While all the congregation looked 
aghast, and the priestly sire of these impious soii3 ^ood 
speechless with holy grief, at such terrific retribution, it 
was ordained as "a statute forever" to the house of Aaron, 
"Do not drink wine, nor strong- drink, thou nor thy sons 
with thee;" death being the penalty of its violation 
(Lev. x. 9.) 

Whether this ordinance owed its origin, as Rabbi Jacob 
Ben Ascher and other cabalistic commentators teach, to the 
fact that Nadab and Abiliu had committed the sacrilege, 
for which they suffered such summary punishment, in a fit 
of inebriation, disqualifying them, as a natural effect of all 
intoxicants, for a clear discrimination between right and 
wrong, the sacred narrative does not inform us; though the 
subtext seems to warrant such an inference, by the assign- 
ment of a reason for the divine prescript: "That ye may 
put difference between. holy and unholy, and between clean 
and unclean." 

It is not surprising, that, to regain for a worsted world 
some of the vantage ground fraudulently wrested from 
possession of the princely Steward of Paradise by satanic 
machination, the Nazaritic Order should have been insti- 
tuted about the same tune that the Aaronic statute against 
the use of inebriating beverages was enacted. 

So far back, therefore, as 1490 B. C, or 3360 years ago, 
a most sacred vow of total abstinence was required at the 
hand of every Nazarite; and this vow was assumed under 
the observance of solemnly imposing ceremonies, instituted 
by divine appointment (Num. v. 1-21). From Biblical 
history we further ascertain, that 350 years after — that is, 
1140 B. C, or 3010 years ago — the mighty Samson was a 
member of that abstemious Order, with which he had been 
connected from his very birth (Judg. xvi. 17). Again: 
while Jehu reigned over the revolted tribes oi Israel, 



10 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

Jehonaclab constituted a regular temperance society of all the 
descendants of his father Reehab, in the year 884 B. C, or 
2754 years ago; and we learn that they had scrupulously 
observed their total abstinence pledge down to 590 B. 0., 
when Jehoiakim was king of Judah ( Jer. xxxv. 14) ; being 
a continuous term of 294 years. 

Let none suppose, however, that, at the time last named, 
or even when the ceremonial dispensation was abrogated 
by the advent of Messiah, this Order became extinct; for 
John the Baptist was a Nazarite from his mother's womb 
(Luke i. 15). How, therefore, any Christian, especially, 
can repudiate our principles, or oppugn our various organi- 
zations, is, to my mind, a problem too abstruse for easy 
solution. Once more : as if to demonstrate beyond all cavil, 
that such associations are as perfectly compatible with the 
genius of Christianity as with the institutions of Judaism, 
the ceremonies of the Order were religiously observed by 
St. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles, while he 
temporarily abode at Cenchrea, A. D. 53 (Acts xviii. 18). 
Seven years afterward, we again find him associated with 
four young Nazarites in the performance of the same cere- 
monies at Jerusalem; and this, too, in conformity to the 
solemn advice of the elders of the church (Acts xxi. 24-26). 

This annalistic survey affords us the highest possible 
evidence that God himself wielded the principle of total 
abstinence from all that intoxicates, as an efficient means 
of preserving the purity of his church: that many of the 
most eminent characters of sacred history were zealous 
abettors and personal colaborers in this divine plan of 
restraining the vicious appetites of errant humanity: that 
this instrumentality was brought to bear upon the moral 
interests of mankind through regularly organized associa- 
tions, consolidating personal influence and individual 
example into combined effort and united action: that the 
organization of which the Temples, the Divisions, and the 



\\-TTorv ANNAM OF TOTAL ABSTINENCE. 17 

Lodges of our orders are affiliated antitypes, maintained a 

prominent position among divine institutions throughout 
the lengthened period of 1550 years. 

Such interesting facts, therefore, fully confirmed by 
"proofs from Holy Writ," should certainly have sufficient 
weight with every candid mind, to remove the really 
frivolous ( however honest) objections entertained by even 
some conscientious members of the church to the temper- 
ance orders of the present day, which claim, notwithstand- 
ing- these objections, close affinity with the organizations of 
antiquity. 

The latter, it is true, when the sceptre, as had been 
predicted, was wrested from the hand of Judah, in conse- 
quence of the rejection of the gospel of the Son of God, 
appear rather to have become disconnected from the 
dispensation of Emmanuel, and to have expired with the 
superseded ritual of the Jews, to which, while hi force, they 
had specially pertained. It is likewise true, that, when the 
light of Christianity was obscured and almost wholly hidden 
in the darkness of the middle ages, the church seems to 
have repudiated her responsibilities on this subject, and to 
have discarded her divinely ordained instrumentalities ; 
thus sinfully neglecting the purgation of her own denied 
altars, and the fulfilment of her mission of redemption. 

Lamentable as was such defection, it was nevertheless, 
through a remarkable twofold coincidence in the train of 
benef active providences, rendered subservient, as we learn 
from the facts of history, to a more comprehensive recogni- 
tion of her long ignored responsibilities in Germany, where 
the Reformer of Wirtemberg first revived liberty of 
conscience ; and to a more effective resumption of her long- 
abandoned instrumentalities in these United States, where 
the Sage of Monticello first advocated constitutional 
freedom of relieious worship. 



18 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS 

Passing over the abortive attempts of St. Christopher, 
m 1517, and of Maurice, landgrave of Plesse, in 1G0Q, it is 
worthy of observation, in elucidating these coincidences, 
that the first society organized in modern times for the 
abatement and suppression of intemperance was founded 
in Germany in 1690, or 180 years ago. 

Again: barely adverting to the facts, that in the same 
year — 1G90 — the first prohibitory liquor law on record, 
embodying the essential features of the more recent enact- 
ment on the subject, was passed in York, Maine, while 
that now comparatively ancient town enjoyed the franchises 
of a city corporation — John Davies being then mayor — 
under the oldest charter of the kind ever granted to a 
community on the western continent, with the exception of 
St. Augustine, Florida; that, 42 years later, namely, in 1732, 
the patriotic Oglethorpe, at the settlement of Georgia, 
wisely prohibited the introduction of ardent spirits into the 
infant colony; that the First Continental Congress, in 1774, 
passed, and recorded on its journal, a strong recommend- 
ation to all the States to prohibit by law the distillation of 
grain into whiskey; and that 62 years ago, Dr. J. B. Clarke, 
of New York City, and twenty-two others, formed them- 
selves into an association under a pledge to abstain from 
distilled spirits and then* compounds, except at public 
dinners, or on festive occasions; it should yet be borne in 
mind that it was not until 1824, or 1825, that the idea of 
societies based upon the fundamental principle of total 
abstinence inculcated in the Aaronic ordinance, and volun- 
tarily observed by the Nazaritic and Eechabite orders, had 
actual birth in America. 

Providence, moreover, kindly commissioned the spirit of 
redemption to different points of our favored country; and 
a triple movement was almost simultaneously made in 
Massachusetts, Georgia, and South Carolina; the priority 
of action in the premises remaining to the .present time an 



ANTIQUE AXNALs OF TOTAL ABSTINENCE^ 19 

unsettled question between these three pioneer States. 
Whichsoever is entitled to the credit, nevertheless, not 
quite half a century has yet elapsed since the first bold 
signature to a total abstinence pledge was written in these 
United States; and in that brief space of time, eager 
millions have crowded to the Lodge, the Division, and the 
Temple, to register their names, too, on the blazing scroll 
of honor. This mighty movement has, in addition, uncap- 
ped the seething cauldrons, and extinguished the Moloch 
fires, of many thousand distilleries, from the reeking sluices 
of which once teemed the lava tide of pollution, boiling 
and burning in every surge of its desolating course. This 
is success, which, in all the history of moral reform since 
the Christian era, finds no parallel. 

Nothing, hence, can more beautifully and forcefully 
illustrate the indissoluble connection between vital religion 
and total abstinence — between the church herself and 
temperance organizations; both suffering, at the same 
time, like reverses of fortune, and both enjoying, at the 
same time, like triumphs. Hence, too, nothing more clearly 
demonstrates the imperative duty of the church, embracing 
every member in his personal identity, to bend the best 
energies of her spirituality in aid of an enterprise proclaimed, 
both by its origin and its results hitherto, to be equally 
the cause of God and of man. 

Some, to shift the momentous responsibility thus 
devolved upon them, and to hush the clamorous impor 
tunity of an enlightened conscience, would fain screen 
themselves behind a dangerous delusion; and quote, in 
justification of their passivity, the language of Jesus to the 
apostles, who forbade the casting out of devils, in his 
name, by one that followed not with them: " He that is not 
against us is on our part." 

Alas ! how has this divine apothegm been disingenuously 
construed into a subterfuge of weak heads and cold hearts; 



20 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

thus neutralizing the leaven of our hallowed principles, 
checking our triumphant progress, and palsying the arm of 
our strength. A misconception of its spirit has been more 
detrimental to our cause than all the hostile forces with 
which we have had to contend. It is nevertheless, to me, 
a source of self-gratulation, that any one should have 
hazarded its citation in support of an ethical philosophy so 
widely at variance with the Samaritan benevolence incul- 
cated throughout the gospel, since it is only from a thought- 
ful study of the teachings of inspiration, that man correctly 
learns his moral obligations. 

I very cordially admit — it were sheer blasphemy to deny 
— the truth of the axiom; but its exemptive force in the 
case of such as refuse co-operation in the temperance 
enterprise, I utterly decline, with all due deference to their 
Christian feelings, to acknowledge. Look at the character 
of him whom our Lord thus commended. He was a 
working man, for he "cast out devils:" he used the same 
mighty engine of miraculous power which the apostles 
employed, "the name of Christ." 

Work, therefore, my brother, I beseech you by all you 
hold true in logic and binding in ethics, with our- effective 
instrumentalities in casting out the demon of intemperance, 
and we will joyfully recognize thee as " not against us," 
but "on our part." Only on this condition can we regard 
thee other than an enemy. Pardon the seemingly 
uncharitable expression; for I would not offend by the 
utterance of a solitary harsh word: but, oh, remember, 
that same lip of Eternal Truth hath declared : " He that is 
not with me, is against me; and he that gathereth not with 
me, scattereth abroad." 



s£«Vf v*. £u]uov : 



A MIDNIGHT .SCENE. 



GrOj ask the poor degraded debauchee 
Why he prostrates, in midnight'revelry, 
Those lofty— almost boundless — pow'rs of mind, 
Which were by Heaven for noble ends designed. 
Go, seek him in his haunts : there view the sot. 
Forgetful of the ills himself begot ! 
The empty bottle and the half drained cup : 
The sigh to think there's but another sup ; 
The boist'rous ha, ha, ha ! of causeless joy ; 
The smile that lingers others to decoy ; 
The idiot stare that marks th' inebriate train ; 
The bloated visage and the phrensied brain ; 
All speak that, thought the thought he once abhorred. 
His beastly appetite is now his lord, 
While all his passions own the tyrant's sway, 
Ancl fly contented— aye. well pleased— t' obey. 

But ah ! ye need not ask alone of him : 
Go to yon chamber, where the taper dim, 
'Mid dreary silence, with pale, flick'ring light, 
Reveals the squalid mis'rics of the night. 
There, ragged children and a sickly wife, 
With scarce enough to meet the wants of life. 
Are doomed to droop, like long neglected flowers 
Deprived in summer of refreshing showers. 

Ask, why those scalding teardrops, stealing slow 
Adown the cheek now blanched by untold woe. 
And who is she that weeps, in secret, o'er 
Once happy days, which may return no more ? 
That looks in sadness on her babes at rest. 
While sighs convulsive heave her throbbing breast ? 
That views their bed of straw, and groans to think 
They lie unconscious on starvation's brink? 
That ga7.es weary at the lazy clock, 
Whose scarcely moving hands appear to mock 
Her anxious thoughts, which, whirling as the wind, 
With dread forebodings fill her tortured mind? 



22 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

'T is she, the loved one when in blooming youth, 
To whom the monster swore eternal truth ! 
Alas ! that loved one from his arms he shook. 
Another idol to his bosom took, 
And love of wife and children swallowed up 
In base devotion to the damning cup. 

Oh ! had but Ternp'ranco, with her might divine . 
Strengthened the ties young Love did erst entwine 
Around the husband's and the father's heart. 
Then never had been aimed the poisoned dart. 
Which now too deep inflicts the cank'ring wound. 
xAud madly deals its reckless blows around : 
Then never had his worse than widowed wife 
Been forced to linger out a wretched life, 
While doomed the poignant, fatal pang to prove 
Of deep and pure, yet unrequited love : 
Then never had his babes been taught to name 
Their father with the burning blush of shame ! 

Ye mothers, wives, and daughters, save, oh! save 
A" our husbands, sons, and fathers from a grave, 
O'er which, ere long, 't will be disgrace to keep 
Your mournful vigils, or a tear to weep. 
Point them, from thirsty passion's darksome maze, 
To yon bright light round Abstinence that plays : 
And while to you they pledge undying love, 
Bid them to all its deathless nature prove, 
By prompt alignment with those gallant bands, 
Whose peaceful banners, broidered by your hand-. 
One legend bear o'er hill top and o'er plain— 
kk Love Rum, and Die : Love Woman, and Abstain ! " 

If, gentle reader, thine the woeful lot 
To be, for life, united to a sot, 

With whom love seems a scarce remembered name. 
Traced in the ashes of its smothered flame, 
Thy charms around the doomed to future woe, 
With lovely woman's magic sweetness, throw : 
And emulating Georgia's daughter fair— 
A bright example of devotion rare — 
This truth unto the sneering skeptic prove, 
That love of rum will yield to woman's love. 

Where yonder cabin, built of rough hewn logs, 
Gives shelter to a herd of mud washed hogs, 
W T hich daily grunt beneath its puncheon floor. 
Stand, sit, or lie around the loophole door 
A crowd, who, like their swill fed neighbors, fill 
Their stomachs with the lava of the still. 



LOVE \-. LIQUOR, 23 

\ifl . pi nd the remnant of the las 1 week' gains 
p their vitals, and to craze their brains. 
As, late, they lingered o'er the bottle long, 
Spending the night in ribald jest and song, 

Their tongues grew boastful as their sense grew Less, 
And oaths were used their pointless wit t' express : 
Love's holy casket of domestic joys 
Was robbed of sacred things, to furnish toys 
Wherewith to banish thought of vows long due 
To wives neglected, yet to love still true. 
One, strangely reckless of his own disgrace- 
How fell the spirit of so foul a place !— 
All other boasts exhausted in the strife, 
Vaunts the possession of a pious wife. 
To make his sacrilegious bragging good, 
He straight invites the whole Satanic brood 
Home" with him to return that self-same night, 
And test her patience in their drunken plight. 
One brimmer drink they, and their bottles fill, 
While bowing stands the Pluto of the till, 
As from hell's ante chamber forth they reel, 
Amid the dark their winding path to feel. 

That angel wife, when sank the sun a,way, 
Her babes had gathered round her knee, to pray 
A blessing on their erring father's head, 
Before retiring to their sheetless bed, 
Beside which she— that drunkard's faithful wife— 
Herself then knelt to plead for longer life : 
Not for herself, or babes, but for their sire— 
A faggot fitted for eternal fire— 
The boon she craved, in hope some ray of light 
Might break upon his spirit's starless night, 
To gild his future prospects, and to save 
Her youth's fond idol from a drunkard's grave. 
And then, unpiilowed, she serenely slept, 
While angels round their guardian vigils kept. 
And through the love lit chambers of her soul 
Bade visions rapt of bliss immortal roll. 

Soon on the stillness of the midnight broke 
The heavy tramp of many feet, and woke 
Her slumb'ring senses, steeped in purest joys. 
To mirth profane and revelry's harsh noise. 
The gaitlcss footsteps reached the chair barred door. 
By rude kicks jarred, each ruder than before. 
A gruff, hoarse voice, essaying to disguise 
Its stannn'ring thickness, bade her quick arise, 
And give admittance to the reeling crowd. 
Who all, to listen, hushed their clamor loud : 
But not the murmurs which each thought t<> hear, 



24 TEMPERANCE LEAIXETS. 

l r cll from the victim on his straining car : 

And as they entered, crouching round the hearth. 

A nameless feeling checked their maudlin mirth. 

She stirred the embers, fanned the dying brands, 
And piled the few dead branches her own hands 
Had gathered up to serve her morning's fire, 
Till high the blaze shot up its curling spire. 
Next, at command of her besotted lord, 
She quickly spread her clean, but clothless board ; 
Then brought the morsel of the next day's food, 
T' appease the hunger of the wolfish brood : 
And though she saw the wasting of her all, 
For which her babes would on the morrow call, 
Her brow still wore its cloudless sun the while. 
Her voice its sweetness, and her lip its smile. 

So gentle spirit and so lovely mien— 
Graces in union meet too seldom seen— 
Begot in one, despite his drunken plight. 
Some dull reflections on the wondrous sight. 
Till, nearly sobered by his long surmise, 
He sought solution of his strange surprise, 
And asked how thus obedience she could yield 
To one neglecting her from want to shield : 
That, too, with such sweet, winsome, matchless grace 
As gave ev'n merited complaint no place. 

" Ah, sir," she answered, ''wifely grace you deem. 
What of a higher fount is but the stream : 
T is grace divine its conq'ring power lends. 
And my proud will to God's just pleasure bend.-. 

" Ere yet the lustre of my eye grew dim, 
I fondly gave my trusting heart to him 
Who threw it as a worthless bauble by, 
Despite his burning vows enrolled on high. 
Though stealthy tears, away, on meeting, brushed, 
Grief borne in silence o'er affections crushed, 
And patience under wrongs, wake not his ruth, 
Still love I him with all the strength of youth : 
Nor, till the last rude wave of earthly woe 
Its darkling foam shall o'er my temples throw. 
And bid me all the blissful past forget, 
Shall this racked heart, wherein the image yet 
Of first love's idol doth in beauty stand. 
As when he gained my all with this poor hand. 
Inconstant in its life devotion prove, 
Or check the impulse of its deathless love. 

" I see him blindly nearing ruin's brink : 
And shall I basely from my duty shrink ? 
Before him yawns a deep, unfathomed pit : 



. \ -. Li'M OB. ^-) 

Above, the sky's with lurid lightning lit : 
Behind, the sin avenging angel scowls ; 

On either side hell's darkest demon prowls ; 

Hope, Mercy's Ion- lived child, is nigh entombed : 

And Fear regards him as already doomed : 

Shall I anticipate the Judgment Day, 

And bid its terrors round his spirit play? 

Shall I, in time— poor drunkard though he be— 

Present the chalice of eternity ? 

No : though the damning vice I loathe— abhor, 

Pity and patience would I crave therefor, 

And love shall pluck the thorns from life's dark path, 

Since on his future gleams but endless wrath." 

The words found lodgment : that neglected wife. 
Picgardless of the ills that marked her life, 
By love inspired, requiting love begot 
In the cold bosom of the list'ning sot, 
"Who once, in early manhood's joy and pride, 
Had pressed her to his heart a blushing bride ; 
For as her touching tale of love he heard, 
His inmost soul the old affection stirred. 
Thus, wooing gently to the path she trod, 
She won him back to virtue and to God. 



3iltow»tt'0 Wwwt mH Womn'$ Woxh 



A candid recital of the woes known only to the cheerless 
ingleside of the drunkard's home, that are passing over our 
beautiful earth like avenging Asrael over Egypt the night 
before the exodus, and touching with deadly blight the 
cherished hopes of woman's trusting soul, should beget un- 
hesitating recognition of the propriety, not to say the neces- 
sity, of an immediate proscription of all that intoxicates; and, 
as well, of woman's active co-operation in this hallowed 
work. Could we collect the ruined relics of domestic joys 
dashed in pieces by the ruthless hand of the inebriate, they 
would form a monument outmeasuring the pyramid of 
Cheops in its huge dimensions, and more ghastly, in its 
terrors, than the tower of seventy thousand human skulls 
reared by the conquering Tamerlane. Earth would groan 
beneath its mighty pressure, and Hell herself shrink back 
from such appalling proof of her own malevolence. 

When confiding woman feels the just bursting bud of 
wedded happiness blighted by the hoar frost of neglect, or 
torn heartlessly from its native attachments by the hand of 
a husband's cruelty ; when she writhes beneath the sateless 
gnawings of a canker worm, rioting on the bruised core of 
a broken heart : when she shrinks, in grief unutterable, 
from even the* commiseration of friendship that once knew 
her in the couched and curtained halls of affluence : when 
she nurses her sorrows in the hovel of abject poverty, where 
shriveled Want stands solitary porter at the unwicketed 



WOttAH's WRONGS AND woman's WORKS. 27 

gateway : when she folds to her lacerated bosom the paling 
embodiment of maternal love, that may never know the 
benizou of a father's affection — and all tins from the en- 
slavement of her soul's youthful choice to beastly appetite 
and brutalizing vice : then, truly, does humanity suffer in 
its highest and holiest connections. 

Oh, could we mi veil the penetralia of her gentle breast, 
and see how all the bright expectations of life have been 
prematurely blasted ; how her dearest joys have been made 
a football for the maudlin sport of him who should have 
cherished the heart confided to his keeping, as the richest 
treasure in her gift : could we behold her pining in penury, 
while the meagre earnings of her attenuated hands are 
squandered in his midnight orgies, and their scanty means 
of subsistence frittered away to quench his burning thirst : 
could w T e view her tossing on her comfortless pallet, as if 
her fragile frame endured the agonizing martyrdom of a 
Procrustean bed : could we read the forlorn anguish of her 
soul as she looks upon her children, whose piteous cries for 
bread ring in her ears like the famished howl of Action's 
dogs, eager for their master's flesh : methinks the impas- 
sioned record of her sufferings alone, would suffice to stir 
the noblest impulses of our nature for the suppression of 
intemperance. 

It were well if the Vandal enemy pushed the triumphs 
of his cruelty no farther ; but while, with the midiscrimin- 
ating malice of the Ute warrior, his tomahawk cleaves in 
twain the broad aegis thrown around woman by her sex, his 
scalping knife, with equal ferocity, seeks the defenceless 
head of infancy ; and as, w T ith savage glee, he wipes the 
reeking blade upon its dimpled cheek, he leaves there the 
revolting imprint — " The Drunkard's Child ! " 

When that child, saved only by the angel ministrations 
of maternal love, shall have gained the strength of mature 
years, he may seek to fly the degradation entailed upon him 



28 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

by a brutal father ; but ah, he soars on the waxen wings of 
Icarus, and his very ascent from the chill atmosphere that 
filled the cabin of his early life, by melting the perfidious 
pinions in the sunshine of hope, but precipitates him the 
lower into the disgrace he inherits from an inebriate sire : 
or, goaded to phrensy by the undeserved gibes of a heartless 
world, he may, in very desperation, essay, Phaeton like, to 
guide the horses of his fathers chariot over the guilt im- 
bedded course of vice, and perish in the rash attempt. 

From such considerations as these, I would include the 
female portion of my readers within the purview of argu- 
ments addressed to my own sterner sex ; especially as our 
noble cause has paramount claims upon you, Ladies, in 
every relation of life, whether as mother or daughter, sister 
or wife. Indeed, in view of the various items which go to 
make up the terrible aggregate of your sufferings, as they 
teem from the inebriating cup, I know not but truth will 
justify the declaration, that you have a greater interest at 
stake on the issue of our philanthropic labors, than even 
man himself. Such, too, are the circumstances of your 
social position, that, however, opportune, energetic, and 
continuous, the resistance you oppose, hi your individual 
capacity, to the devastating ravages of intemperance, you 
are nevertheless doomed, oftentimes, to endure the poignant 
ills of poverty and disgrace, of blighted hope and crushed 
affection — all of thousand fold pressure, because forced 
down upon your bleeding hearts by the Titan hand of 
domestic despotism. 

The difficulty, however, of enlisting your active, personal 
co-operation in the enterprise of temperance, rests, perhaps, 
not so much in misapprehension of duty, as in your too 
modest undervaluation of female influence. Now, it should 
become matter of encouragement to you, as well as of 
thankful self-gratnlation, that, while man proudly arrogates 
the distinctive title, " head of creation," woman constitutes 



WOMAN'S WRONGS AND WOMAN'S WOBK. 20 

that graceful column — the neck — which unites the head to 
the body of the material universe, and gives it, at once, 
both support and motion. Not a movement, indeed, does 
man make in his transit through the great ecliptic of life, 
from the cradle to the cofiin, but owes something of its 
bearing or its force, direct or mediate, to the agency of 
woman's influence. Go, search the archives of antiquity, 
if you want the proof. 

Roman history, throughout the entire period extending 
from the rape of the Sabines to the conquest of Justinian 
by Theodora, furnishes memorable examples of woman's 
controlling influence upon the civil fortunes of the world, 
lie ad the illustrious biographies of Lucretia, Virginia, 
Yolumnia, Vetnria, and Fabia, — wife of Licinius, the first 
plebeian consul, indebted for the attainment of that dignity 
to her well advised policy: and, however manners and 
customs may fluctuate with the ages, all nations, as Hume 
justly remarks, turn with one accord, for the idea of a 
patriotic matron to Cornelia, the daugher of Scipio and the 
mother of the Gracchi. 

Nay : why recur to climes and centuries thus remote ? 
Suppose you that the infamous massacre of embryo repub- 
licans in Boston, or even the bloody assault upon would-be 
freemen in the streets of Lexington, by the hireling soldiery 
of the Third George, would have been so promptly avenged 
by the dreadful strife of Bunker Hill, or followed by the 
Declaration of 1776, together w 7 ith the desperate struggles 
for liberty and the glorious triumphs of a seven years' w T ar, 
but for the animating " God speed!" of patriot daughters, 
who traced their noble lineage to the pilgrim band of the 
Mayflower? Or, going a little further back in the history 
of Independence, think you that Boston harbor, odious as 
was the principle of taxation without representation, w r ould 
have been converted into one vast tea urn for the fragrant 
cargoes of the Dnrtsmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, 



30 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

but for the solemn pledge of our colonial mothers — reduced 
as it was to writing — to abstain from the luxury — almost 
grown to a necessity from long continued indulgence — of 
their favorite beverage ? 

While, therefore, the glowing pages of your country's 
history present such illustrations of woman's influence, no 
longer doubt, fair reader, the power of your sex to shape 
the character and to direct the course of ours; nor question 
the propriety of exerting that influence even through a 
sacred vow of total abstinence from all that can intoxicate, 
unnecessary though it be for your own protection from a 
vicious habit, and assumed, in the spirit of a pure philan- 
thropy, for the benefaction of those who may be snared in 
the toils of the rum fiend: rather, bring your undivided 
energies to bear upon the hallowed project of man's 
redemption from the bondage of appetite. 

Mother ! who hast marked the strange working of thy 
first-born's features, as the dull consciousness of his scarcely 
ended debauch glared lividiy, for a moment, over his stolid 
countenance, and then settled down upon his brazen brow 
into a dark scowl of utter recklessness; who hast heard the 
whispered prayers of infancy, taught him at thy knee, 
exchanged for blasphemous imprecations, so near akin to 
the horrible curses of the nether world, that they seem fiery 
enough to blister the very tongue which gives them 
utterance : Sister ! who hast seen the brilliant corruscations 
, of a brother's genius quenched by the Asphaltean stream 
of the wine cup; the energies of a brother's noble ambition 
crushed in the grasp of the bottle imp; and the light of a 
brother's virtue extinguished by the foul atmosphere of the 
brothel: Wife! who hast witnessed thy once manly 
husband, just as he stepped upon the arena of life a success- 
ful competitor for the palm of merit, stricken down by the 
murderous wand of Bacchus; who hast followed, with painful 
footsteps, the rugged paths by which that husband has 



woman's WRONGS vni> woman's work. 31 

descended, in his shameful wanderings, to the scene of the 
prodigal's dishonor and want; who hast found him, at 
length, in the habitations of infamy, only to behold, in his 
altered mien and abject manners, the very embodiment of 
utter wretchedness and the portraiture of deathless woe; 
who hast seen thy children skulk, in tearful silence, from 
the aj;>proach of their drunken sire, beneath whose cruel 
blows, thyself hast, many a time and oft, reeled in pain: 
would ye dissuade us from laborious, persistent effort hi a 
cause, the magnitude of which is spanned only by world 
wide desolation, as its issues involve the interests alike of 
time and of eternity ? 

No, no, no: ye all, amid the stifled moans of injured 
innocence, bid us onward, in God's name; and onward will 
we go to battle and to victory : but what, now, though your 
social habits shield you from personal danger ? Are there 
not around you, every where and all times, hapless objects 
of commiseration, whose deplorable circumstances call for 
every appliance of philanthrophy to be put at once into 
active use? If ever, then, the sorrowful spectacle of 
another's sufferings horn, the rage of sensual appetite, has 
stirred the depths of your bosom with a yearning desire to 
see the wild beast chained, O employ, gentle reader, in 
behalf of temperance, the eloquence of your pleadings, the 
weight of your influence, the force of your efforts: and the 
fervent gratitude of the drunkard's wife and babes shall 
encincture your brow with the rich reward of benevolence, 
more redolent of sweets than the bays of the poet, and 
more perennial in beauty than the laurels of the chieftain. 



OR THE FIRST INVASION OF WOMAN'S RIGHTS. 



Amid the splendor, until then unknown. 
Emblazoning the Medio-Persian throne, 
When Babylon, enriched by Judah's fall, 
Had been reduced by Cyrus to his thrall, 
Ahasuerus, in his pomp and pride, 
The halls of Shusan's palace opened wide, 
Where lordly princes, whose immense domains 
From India stretched to Ethiopia's plains, 
Wild revels plied— no better, if no worse, 
Than those that wrought Belshazzar's fatal curse , 
And from the orgies of these drunken wights 
The First Invasion dates of Woman's Rights. 

Urged e'en to phrensy by the mocking fiend, 
That on his foaming wine cup danced and grinned, 
The Persian monarch, now a senseless sot, 
His own imperial dignity forgot, 
And, to his fallen manhood's deep disgrace, 
Would fain unveil his queenly consort's face 
Before the eyes of that polluted crew, 
Who formed his bacchanalian retinue. 

His seven days' carousal fired his brains, 
And forth he sent his liv'ried chamberlains 
To bring fair Vashti, with the royal crown, 
Where all her graces might be noted down. 
Oh, chilled must be th' affections of that heart, 
Which could perform such base, ignoble part, 
As bid the princes glare, in lewd amaze, 
On charms too sacred but for love's own gaze ! 
Dead to the sanctity of nuptial vows 
Must be the soul that could a virtuous spouse— 
Because, indignant, she those charms refused 
To have for sport of drunken lords abused— 
Thrust from the rooftree where, in youth, she poured 
The priceless lovejwith which her breast was stored ! 



WINE VS. WOMAN. 38 

Well for the world] thy might, Immortal Gtrao 1 1 
Strengthens in good the feeblest of our race. 
Thou art the offspring of Eternal Love, 
Beyond comparison, all price above ; 
Qirdlesa as ev'n immensity's vast zone ; 
Firm as the pillars of Jehovah's throne! 
While Vice, all palsied by thy ringer's touch, 
Feeling how worthless is tho rotten crutch 
Of human power, whence she sought support, 
Her steps to stay, her sembled charms to sport, 
Stands trembling on damnation's nearmost verge, 
As Conscience moans the prelude of her dirge, 
With vizor fallen, and her features known, 
Her boasted graces all deception shown, 
With limbs now helpless and with nerves unstrung, 
Speechless to call for aid her lying tongue, 
Virtue, when fanned by thine enliv'ning breath, 
Bids bold defiance ev'n to ghastly death ; 
Upon the sund'ring of her dearest ties 
Still gazes calmly with unquailing eyes, 
And, at the piecemeal murder of each joy, 
Finds for her energies some new employ ; 
Sweet nectar quaffs, and eats ambrosial food, 
In holy culture of the pure and good. 

The purity which woman stamps, on earth, 
Akin to beings of angelic birth, 
Once soiled by sin, the darkness dread partakes, 
That reigns unbroken over Stygian lakes. 
Her matchless charms, which once but shone to please, 
Now serve affection's thermal fount to freeze : 
Her eye, once kindling with a vestal fire, 
Xo longer can a holy thought inspire : 
Though once all sunny was her winsome smile, 
It now seems but of sorcery the wile : 
Her voice, once sweet as seraph's softest tone, 
Now grates like deepest bass of harsh trombone : 
Her words, which did in blessings once abound, 
With caustic taunts and vile reproach resound : 
Her sympathies unstrung, and toneless all, 
The honey of her love is turned to gall I 

With her, oh, who a union would desire, 
As intimate as mingling flames of fire? 
Or gushing droplets from the fountain clear ? 
Or gaseous elements of atmosphere ? 
Just such the union matrimony forms, 
If born in calm, or nurtured 'mid wild storms : 
If silken bonds, or galling iron chains— 
If pleasures bright, or gloomy sorrow's pains — 
ace launched upon this life-broad 



B* 



34 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

We thenceforth drop distinctive entity, 

En wreathing fires their lambent flames entwine, 

Atomic globules of the rain combino, 

And gases rare into each other pass, 

Till each becomes one homogeneous mass. 

A nature unitive thus Hymen lends, 

And two in person in one spirit blends. 

thou fair creature ! who, by kindly Heaven, 
To fill the chalice of man's bliss wast given, 
Remember, thou art with thy pow'r endued 
To woo from evil, and to win to good. 
Though as the moon thine influence be mild, 
It plays not on the icebergs, mountain piled, 
Of his stern heart with her unmelting rays ; 
But, centring there in one bright focal blaze, 
Like solar beams by lens together brought, 
Humanity to any mould is wrought : * 
If good, in light ; if ill, it clothes in gloom ; 
It shapes man's destiny, and seals his doom. 

And thou, who feel'st the truth which all must own- 
That " 'tis not good for man to be alone "— - 
Oh, take not her as helpmeet to your arms, 
Whose sole attraction is her person's charms ; 
Whose only beauty is a Helen's face, 
And waist made sylph-like by her corset lace ; 
Within whose Hebe's breast Alecto's heart 
Leaps to the music of fell Circe's art, 
And through her veins pours Cleopatran blood, 
Black as the tide of Acheron's foul flood. 
Yet she, who, though denied a Venus' face, 
A Juno's figure, or Aglaia's grace, 
Hath temper sweet and intellectual mind, 
A heart to love, a soul to God, inclined, 
By half will lessen all thine earthly woe, 
And round thy joys a double halo throw. 

Ah, had Ahasuerus heard the voice 
Of wisdom true, commending Yashti's choice, 
Rather to brave her angered liege-lord's frown, 
Than wear— life-long disgrace !— a sullied crown. 
He ne'er had issued the debased command, 
That she before a maudlin court should stand* 
Fair cynosure of leering debauchees, 
Whose blood, now boiling with long revelries, 
Would fiercely pulse, and pulse with only lust, 
Filling her soul with horror and disgust. 
But little now the king of honor recked : 
What rights had Yashti that he rhould respect? 



wine vs. WOMAN. 36 

AIM ! the sparkling wine cup's mad'ning mirth, 
(Jives rein to passions of Tartarean birth, 
Which darkly stain th' escutcheon of the realm, 
In poignant grief the modest queen o'erwhclin. 
And, as the crafty Memucan incites, 
Work the subversion, too, of "Woman's Rights. 

God e'er dirocts the smallest acts of men, 
With purpose wise, unknown to human ken : 
What daily we perform, or what we not. 
What is remembered by us, or forgot, 
Alike subserves the plan of Providence, 
In which his wisdom and benevolence 
Their wondrous pow'rs unfailingly combine, 
To work fulfilment of some grand design. 
Events are fibres, minor ends the threads, 
That form the complex web which time outspreads, 
As from eternity's vast loom, each day, 
In passing with the shuttle's flight away, 
Evolves that web : proceeding, ev'ry hour, 
By skilled direction of almighty power. 

A royal council, at the king's behest, 
Convened, and instituted legal quest, 
To find what punishment they should award, 
Such glaring treason to their sovereign lord, 
Futile their rack of brain— vain their pretence- 
No statute find they cov'ring the offence ; 
For Vashti had but hedged her spotless name 
With the same bulwark which Lucretia's fame. 
In after years, protected from the breath 
Of foul suspicion— worse, by far, than death ! 

But, lacking law, at once that bold, bad man. 
The premier of the empire, Memucan, 
Addressed the king and princes with an art, 
Which would have honored a more noble part, 
Than that essaying, through a hapless queen, 
On Woman's Rights to vent its drunken spleen. 

"Beyond the king this wrong," he said, " extends : 
The princes— aye, all husbands it offends ; 
For when from Nile to Ind this scene is told, 
Our Median dames and Persian matrons, bold 
To follow the example Vashti sets, 
Will scorn our mandates and despise our threats. 
Let, therefore, now the queen yield her high place 
To one more worthy of our sovereign's grace. 
And her sad downfall ev'ry woman school 
In due submission to her husbnnd'* rule. 



36 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

Throughout the provinces of this vast realm, 
Of which Ahasuerus holds the helm, 
Be it made known, in legislative course, 
With Medio-Persia's stern, irrevocable force, 
That wives are chattels, like our slaves and pelf, 
With no inherent right to think for self, 
Or wield in aught an independent will, 
Much less pretend, with vaunted virtue's skill, 
To save th' imperiled, sinking ship of state 
From tempests gendered by the wine fiend's hate. 
Both court and kingdom shall be thus redempt 
From woman's malice and the world's contempt." 

His vicious cause the wily sophist won : 
As asked, Ahasuerus bade it done, ' 
And through the provinces, to this intent, 
His letters patent by express were sent, 

No wonder, with such fact in Scripture given, 
Though no where stated as approved of heaven, 
The Tennyson of theologians famed— 
So Bushnell is by Cuyler blandly named— 
Should puff at nature's and at reason's lights, 
To shroud in Egypt's darkness Woman's Bights ; 
And, with proverbial cleanness of new broom, 
To sweep from kitchen and from drawing room, 
The hated ballots of the world's campaign 
For universal suffrage— but in vain. 

Bad logic suiting to a yet worse cause, 
He builds his argument on unjust laws, 
And holds, if all with right to vote are born, 
Those States which of that right some men have shorn, 
Because of inability to read, 
Or thriftless lack of freehold title deed, 
Defraud male citizens ; ne'er therefore should 
Enfranchise woman : this for public good ! 
But. though with facts from Biblic annals armed, 
And, in their use, with poet's license charmed. 
How dare sage Bushnell such position take, 
Unless, indeed, two wrongs one right will make ? 
When next " The Moral Uses of Dark Things," 
In clerkly prose our modern Horace sings, 
A special favor he will doubtless do 
The shoddy prince, and dusky freedman too, 
By showing, in the glare of Hartford lights, 
That " poor white trash " and women have no rights* 

His logic faulty, next keen ridicule, 
The subtle controvertist's two edged tool, 
Gashing full oft the hand that wields it ill, 
Aloft he brandishes with right good will, 



WINE vs. woman. ;>7 

To hack, or frighten, it' he oan ool slay, 
The gfaoeta that round the manly patriot play. 
So demagogues rehearse stale anecdot 

The polls burlesque, and prate of extra v< ; 
Exposing tricks their party pure disowns— 
As how, in Essex (Jersey), Mary Jones, 

With classic features and a smilo so sweet. 
Eclipsed a M Tammany Repeater's" feat, 
By voting early ; then, with change of dress. 
And duo arrangement of each shining tress, 
Voting again, to show her estimate 
Of the rare merit of her candidate ; 
And, questioned of her name, with bird-like trill. 
Responding naively, " I am Mary— Still ! " 

Well, now, Sir Politician, what of that ? 
Do not the very same Mynheer and Pat ? 
Is strategy— employed to blind the eyes. 
And baulk tho queries of inspectors wise— 
The weapon only of the party skunk, 
"With lager bloated, or with bourbon drunk ? 
Shall woman — victim of unequal laws — 
Tried without jury? suffer without cause ? 
With Indians, coolies, idiots be ranked ? 
By gamblers, thieves, and drunkards ever flanked ? 

Nay, Friends of Temp'rance : while she grandly fights 
The wine fiend, pray, acknowledge Woman's Rights. 



ftawg^ ai the g}um |mui 





Well might Solomon say of the wine cup, as the typical 
embodiment of all intemperance, " At the last it biteth like 
a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." More horrible are 
the crushing folds of this monster vice, than the knotted 
doublings on its prey of the anaconda of the East Indian 
jungle: more venomous its tooth than the fatal fang of the 
asp that sucked the boiling life blood of Cleopatra : more 
fascinating the power of the fiend that makes his home on 
the ruby wavelet of the festive glass, than the spell fraught 
glare of the basilisk's eye. Bitter are the sorrows in which 
it steeps its infatuated victim. It robs man of his noblest 
faculties : it dissolves the pearl of peace with more corrosive 
potency than the acid draught of the Egyptian queen: it 
shuts out God, his mercy, and his love from the polluted 
bosom; and hurls its dupe, as with the strength of Cyclops, 
into the abysm of utter degradation, w T here his heart, 
insolvent in the humanities of life, becomes the birth 
chamber of abhorrent crime. 

Man is physically ruined by intemperance. It sends up 
to the brain — that wondrously sensitive organism — a con- 
tinuous exhalation of most noxious natrn-e, which, like the 
flame hot breath of the Khamseen, scorches its delicate 
substance, not the less surely because imperceptibly, until 
it is no longer capable of performing those intellectual 
functions for which it was beneficently designed by the 
great Creator. It exhausts the sensorial energy of the 



RAVAGES OF THE RUM FIEND, 39 

nervous system, so that the best developed form loses alike 
its buoyant elasticity and its graceful symmetry. It impairs 
the forces, both mechanical and chemical, of the digestive 
apparatus, until the power of assimilating food to the 
normal purpose of the animal economy is lost: until 
dyspepsia, with its hydra heads, lurks in every fold of the 
nauseated stomach, and riots upon the undigested chaos of 
its glutting contents: until, indeed, the depraved appetite 
craves naught but the poison pabulum that nourishes the 
worm, which preys upon the stamina of life. It courses 
through the arterial conduits of the blood like a fiery lava 
stream, scathing, in every pulse of its burning progress, the 
fast failing forces of the constitution, until the bloated 
lhnbs of the confirmed sot betoken the speedy wreck of 
what was once the noblest ornament of the Almighty's 
handiwork, and bespeak Ins festering flesh a dainty feast of 
corruption for the grave worm. Upon his carbuncled 
visage, it stamps the darkness of mental obscuration, the 
loathsomeness of moral obliquity, and the fearfulness of 
eternal death. 

The most lofty genius, fitted by nature to soar with the 
cloud piercing eagle, and gaze, undazzled, on the bright- 
ness of spiritual revelations, is prostrated, by intemperance, 
into the very lowest depths, where its pinions are polluted 
with the corruption in which it is content to wallow; and 
where its noblest powers are prostituted to the basest 
purposes. Fancy is cloyed with the artificial food on which 
she is fed, and, like the surfeited bee, dies amid the sweets 
on which she regales. The thinking powers are obtunded 
and destroyed; and man, bereft of reason by his ow T n act, 
and void of instinct by nature, sinks below the level of the 
brute creation. The reflective .faculties are annihilated, so 
that memory retains neither the joyous associations nor the 
saddening recollections of the far fled past. The pleasures 
that sprang from the loves which clustered around his 



40 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

heart, ere affection was drowned in the damning bowl, are 
forgotten; and the pangs that wrung his anguished bosom 
in days by gone, ere the sympathies of his soul for his 
suffering wife and children were quenched in the darkling 
foam of the wine cup, are buried in oblivion. 

Look at the unblushing front with which he views his 
progress in turpitude: the harsh contraction of his once 
manly brow, ere the consciousness of guilty debauch had 
overshadowed it: the sinister compression of his livid lips, 
on which kindly smiles were wont to play : the averted eye, 
which dares not look upon innocence, save for its sacrile- 
gious pollution: the lowering clouds that hang habitually 
upon his distorted features; and you have overwhelming 
evidence of the obliquity of his moral powers. 

As the measure of craving appetence is filled up by 
sensual gratification, its capacity is enlarged at every 
succeeding draught, until, at length, the thirst of the 
bacchanal becomes quenchless as the flames of Tophet. On 
— on — still on, he urges his reckless career, until he forfeits 
Iris own reputation, beggars a fond and doting wife, casts 
his helpless offspring upon the cold, cold charities of a 
pitiless world, and brings the stalwart frame and lithe 
limbs, which once gave token of a sound constitution, as 
low hi ruins as the walls of fated Tyre and Sidon. 

Little, alas ! dreamed he, who, in the gala day of life's 
spring time, cheerily sipped the foam of the social glass, 
that he drank to his own undoing. He would have felled 
to the ground, as the veriest caitiff in existence, him who 
had dared to prophesy his fearful descent to the infamy of 
the drunkard's lot. As little dreamed he. who, in the 
bitterness of disappointed hope, sought deceptive solace in 
the Lethean depths of the .stupefiant bowl, that he was 
unsealing vials of wrath, which, in after years, would pour 
upon him the flood tide woes of the damned. Quite as 
little now dreams he, who, in mere pastime hilarity, 



BAVAGES OF THE RUM FIEND. 41 

venturer the hazardous experiment oi' occasional, moderate 
indulgence, that he but treads a pathway already marked 

with the unsteady steps of the reeling inebriate, and tend- 
ing, with rectilinear precision, to the revolting charnel of 
the sot. 

Conscience, indeed, may often admonish him of the 
terrible consequences of yielding to appetite; but her voice 
is inefficient to awaken reflection in the mind of one so 
imbruted and enslaved. Alike forgetful of his creation and 
regardless of his doom, he tramples under foot the most 
solemn obligations of the moral law. Social duties are 
neglected, and, mayhap, social ties heartlessly severed. 
Matrimonial vows and parental claims are equally 
unheeded. Recreant to the purest affections of the human 
heart, he becomes the piecemeal murderer of wife and 
children, and brings down the silvered locks of his sire in 
Borrow to the grave. His compact with society is basely 
infracted. The repose of his neighbors is broken by his 
midnight revels: their property, and even their lives 
jeopardized by his riotous passions, which are subject to 
no curb, save a lack of opportunity to perpetrate their 
nefarious purposes. 

It is a melancholy fact, but too well attested by the 
calendar of criminal jurisprudence, that a very large pro- 
portion of the crimes brought under cognizance of our 
courts, originate from the inflaming agency of intemperance 
upon the festering corruption of a depraved heart. 
Rankling passions and fiendish propensities, like dancing 
wavelets lashed into mountain billows by a sudden veering 
of the capricious wind, are roused to resistless fury by the 
whirlwind power of intoxicating liquors. In vain the 
authoritative voice of legal enactment commands, like the 
impotent Canute, "Thus far shaltthou go, and no farther." 
Become a very Minotaur in disposition, and wrought to 
rabidness by the poison which courses through his throb- 



42 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

bitig veins, the inebriate knows no restraint, human or 
divine, and gluts his Lycaon like appetite with deeds of 
rapine and of blood. His soul is fitted for the most 
flagitious crimes — theft, burglary, arson, murder even — 
when goaded onward by the phrensying power of this 
demoniac spirit. In his cruel grasp, the inestimable gem 
of purity is shattered into a thousand atoms, and its 
glittering fragments strewn around in all the confusion of 
utter desolation; and female chastity — priceless, far, beyond 
the Koh-i-noor — becomes the ruined toy of his lascivious 
pastime. 

Could w T e but dispart the veil that closes the portals of 
eternity, and gaze in upon the doom that awaits him there, 
our very souls would start aghast at that joyless destiny. 
With all his powers, intellectual and moral, w r aking, after 
the long stupefaction of this life, to the sad realities of un- 
mitigated misery ; and fitted, by the conditions of their new 
mode of existence, to endure an eternity of pain, amounting, 
in its measure, to little less than infinitude ; he fruitlessly 
writhes amid the tortures that prey upon him. Alas ! his 
barque is launched upon a sea of liquid fire, on w r hose burn- 
ing billows it is doomed, like the phantom ship, to ride for- 
ever ; while the breath of almighty wrath, more scorching 
than the simoom of Sahara, drives him fearfully onward in 
his voyage of endless storms. Such woe, all the blighting 
curses heaped upon the world from creation to the end of 
time, concentrated into a subtle quintessence, and spent 
upon the racked fibres of one solitary heart, not nearly 
equal in its vengeful power. 

Coinciding in the awful truthfulness of this dark picture, 
there are not wanting, nevertheless, those w r ho would fain 
excuse themselves from the discharge of their own personal 
responsibility, by pleading the manifest duty of the Chris- 
tian church to wield her potent energies for the extirpation 
of so debasing a vice. I admit the force of the obligations 



RAVAGES OF THE RUM FIEND. 43 

devolved upon the church by the very terms of her institu- 
tion ; and, at the same time, deplore her too imperfect per- 
formance of positive duty: yet I cannot upbraid her with a 
total disregard of the holy requirements of Heaven in this 
matter ; nor can I allow that her derelictions, howsoever 
culpable, diminish the criminality of individual neglect. 

That I do not err in giving credit to the chiu*ch for much 
of good accomplished by her, hi cultivating habits of so- 
briety, the current facts of ecclesiastical history sufficiently 
demonstrate ; but I must content myself for the present 
with allusion to two instances only, which furnish tangible 
evidence of the moral power wielded by her on this behalf. 

First, may be cited the astonishing reform begun, in 1844, 
by the great and good Dr. Chalmers, and subsequently 
prosecuted by Rev. Mr. Tasker, in that Gomorrah of Edin- 
burgh, the West Port: the very locality where the notorious 
Burke and his equally infamous associates had imbrued 
their hands in the blood of many a victim, for the iniqui- 
tous sake of the paltry sum realized by sale of the bodies 
for dissection. There, where assassination drove his trium- 
phal chariot of death ; where theft plied his Mercurial craft 
night and day ; where mendicity eked out a famished exis- 
tence ; where prostitution celebrated her Eleusinian mys- 
teries ; where the hy£ena of blasphemy, the scorpion of 
falsehood, the vulture of rapine, the chameleon of deceit, 
and the asp of intemperance, all made their common den ; 
even there, were the wild beasts tamed by the heavenly 
influence of that Christian charity, which, as a serpent wise, 
yet harmless as a dove, transforms the roaring lion into a 
gentle lamb. 

We may also contemplate a similar spectacle, as presented 
in the history of " The Old Brewery and the New Mission/' 
in that Sodom of New York, the Five Points ; toward 
which the yearning sympathies of Christian ladies were first 
directed in 1848. Here, too, vice was rampant, and sought 



44 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

the gratification of its Saturnine appetite in the grogshop, 
the brothel, and the gambling hell. Drunkenness consorted 
with crime ; and their triple progeny was filth, rags, and 
ignorance, whose mother tongue w r as profanity, and whose 
native air was lewdness, Neither fear of the Tombs, nor 
dread of Sing Sing, checked their daily debaucheries, or 
stayed their nightly orgies. Tet here, where age burned 
with the lust of youth, and youth grew decrepid with the 
lechery of age; where infancy became maudlin on its 
mother's milk, and manhood matured for the felon's fate; 
where harlotry w r as honored, and chastity was contraband; 
even here, what those vaunted engines of civil power — 
Bridewell and the gallows — could not accomplish, the more 
potent instrumentalities of the church — the pledge of total 
abstinence and the story of the cross — triumphantly 
achieved. 

Lest it be questioned whether the church, in accomplish- 
ing her purpose, or, rather, her still inchoate experiments, 
in such forbidding fields of labor, had any special reference 
to the temperance element of moral reform, I beg leave to 
refer to the following paragraph from the interesting 
volume cited (p. 39): 

"Intemperance prevailed so fearfully in this region, that 
all immediately realized that nothing could be effected, 
until this tide could be stayed. Preaching fell on besotted 
ears in vain; all moral truth was wasted; it was ' casting 
pearl before swine.' Temperance meetings were instituted, 
and held almost weekly in the mission room. The friends 
of the cause rallied there, sang temperance songs, and 
made earnest speeches. In the first year one thousand had 
signed the pledge, including some of the very worst of the 
inhabitants. Since then there has been a steady increase, 
and the closest scrutiny reports that in the large majority 
of cases, the pledge has been fully kept." 

These facts justify the declaration that the church 
has not been wholly derelict in her duty in the premises; 



RAVAGES OF THE Bfl Id 15 

but has nobly put forth her energies to stay the progress 
of this d< rioe: yet supposing, for the sake of the 

argument, thai her potent arm had never been bared, in 
her organized capacity, to arrest the evil, how would, or 
oould, her omission release any one from his personal 
obligations? Forceful are the behests of Heaven, applied 
to each particular individual of our race, as if there was 
not another solitary being in all the wide universe to whom 
these commands pertain. Hence, the utter failure of the 
church to meet her responsibilities, would leave us, inte- 
grally, if our duty remain unperformed, in very critical 
exposure to the retributions of God's violated law. 

Sorrowfully I admit, that, unfortunately for the common 
interests of humanity, but two of our evangelical churches, 
the Slethodist and the Free Baptist denominations — among 
the latter of which I am honored in being a minister — take 
cognizance of drain drinking, by virtue of organic law, as 
derogating from Christian character; and such admission 
is made in no invidious spirit, for, alas, in the very 
churches thus occupying highest ground on the subject, 
next to nothing is done to stay the progress of this vice 
among those classes of society most liable to its horrible 
influence. Repentance, faith, regeneration, holiness of 
heart and life, being the chief topics, as they should be, of 
pulpit ministrations and revival efforts, the absorbing 
question of temperance is regarded rather as an ornament- 
al bough, instead of being treated like one of the vital 
taproots, which it really is, of practical piety. With the 
attention of the church concentrated, first and last, on the 
trunk of the majestic tree, to defend from loathsome 
caterpillars, to remove unsightly excresences, or to lop off 
dead branches, this root receives little or no appropriate 
culture and nutrition; and far away down in the depths of 
the subsoil, the revolting grub worm of sensual indulgence 



46 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

begins his fatal depredations on the ultimate fibrils extruded 
in search of necessary food. 

In other words, while pastor and people are putting forth 
commendable efforts for the conversion of the world into a 
new Eden, they too frequently neglect exclusion from the 
consecrated garden of the flying fiery serpent of the still 
house. Even should they station a cherubic sentinel, with 
flaming sword in hand, turning every way, to guard against 
the entrance of the destroyer, still all these are but defen- 
sive measures, and wo are left mournfully to ask, what 
aggressive movements against the demon of intemperance 
are made by the church ? 

The applied power of your personal efforts, my brother — 
the direct force of your personal influence, my sister — is 
needed in this crusade ; and never in the segregation of 
your individual example — never in the evangelism of your 
ecclesiastic organization — only in the rapid and thorough 
massing of temperance forces, under whatever flag re- 
cruited, and whether drilled in Division, Lodge, or Temple, 
can the victory be won — though won it will be. 



2Uc gvifontt to u Moonbeam. 



Swekt Moonbeam, art thou, too, a prisoner? 
Or comest of thine own accord within 
These loathsome walls ? 

No, no: thou art too pure, 
Too spotless, ever thus to he restrained 
In thy free rovings wheresoe'er thou wilt. 
Thou canst not know the deep, deep stains that dye 
My dark, polluted soul ; nor canst thou feel 
The searing pangs remorseful that contort 
The anguished fibres of my riven heart. 
I— I alone— am guilty ! 

Thou indeed, 
The rippling waters of the brooklet niay'st 
Have quaffed ; or from th' exhaustless depths 
Of Ocean may'st thy gentle thirst have slaked : 
But never from th' intoxicating bowl 
Hast drunk — as I, to my undoing. Thou 
By night may'st wander ; but 'tis noiselessly : 
And, in accordance with a great first law 
In thee by nature's God implanted, thou 
But follow'st onward still thy steady path, 
From source to destination ; while, alas ! 
1, who, like thee, an emanation am 
From Deity's own hand— in nature far 
Above thee, since immortal ; destined for 
A bright eternity of fadeless joy ; 
And, to secure it, with fair reason blessed, 
And moral freedom— I, with brawling voice, 
My nobler faculties by wine debased, 
Or still more deadly rum, the quietude 
Of peaceful night disturb : and, for my foul 
Debauch, to this dread cell am doomed. 

Ah, yes : 
No prisoner art thou, I see ; for still 
Thou gently forward movest, till thou'st reached 
The same small interstice of yonder dark, 
Rough, iron lattice, where thon entcred'st — 
And now art vanished ! 



48 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

Oh, 'tis sad to seo 
The last bright ray, from heav'n sent down, depart, 
And leave me thus in gloom ! But deeper yet 
The gloom that reigns within this tortured breast ! 
A damning sense of guilt! Asp-fanged remorse! 
With what fell throes thou rackest this poor heart ! 

Enjoyed I freedom now with thee, sweet Beam, 
Swift as thoutravelest through trackless space, 
With course direct as thine from yon pale orb, 
On wings of eager hope upborne, I'd fly 
To scenes of innocence, where holy love, 
Though injured much of late, forgiving still, 
Would my return to virtue once more greet ; 
And Delia's fond affections twine themselves 
Around this trembling form, as if within 
My troubled breast no guilt a hiding place 
Had ever found. 

Forever from my lip 
The cursed bowl I'd dash, and under foot 
Would trample it, until around lay strewn 
Its broken fragments, lasting monuments 
Of triumph over appetite achieved. 
"With its red dregs, by demon skill commixed, 
And o'er Gehenna's foulest fires concoct, 
A sadly solemn warning I would write, 
Should gleam upon the eye as vividly 
As that upon Belshazzar's wall erst seen, 
To save my fellows from the dreadful gulf 
Wherein too deep I've plunged. 



She Demon tfxtffriffl 



Again thy victim ! Monster, hence 
Nor tempt me to my own undoing : 

Down to the realm of Tophet, whence 

With living coals my path thou'rt strewing 

Too long have I inhaled the fume 

Uprising from thy steaming chalice ; 

Too often sipped its poisoned spume, 
Commingled by Abaddon's malice : 

Too long and tamely have I worn 

Thy burning fetters, at thine urging : 

Too passively thy yoke I've borne, 
To viler servitude e'er verging. 

But, tyrant! thou hast pushed thy pow'r 
Too far for even human bearing ; 

And now from this eventful hour, 
My soul resolves on noble daring. 

Thy cup I break, thy fetters spurn, 
And dash thine iron yoke in pieces ; 

And as from passion's maze I turn, 
Thy reign o'er mo forever ceases. 

Avaunt, then, Gorgon-headed fiend ! 

Nor tempt my erring senses longer : 
On God's almighty arm I've leaned, 

Than thou, or my poor nature, stronger. 



$.fce povttl Jneftta*, 



I am free ! sings the silver-throat warbler, as high 

He mounts from the cage that so long had confined him : 
Up he soars in his fetterless flight tow'rd the sky, 

And leaves the sad plainings of sorrow behind him ; 
Afresh plumes his pinions, grown weak from disuse, 

While perching short time on the tall forest tree ; 
Then, as if to make sure that he truly is loose, 

He speeds far away in his frolicsome glee. 

I am free ! cries the captive, whom fortune of war 

Had doomed to the mine, or the oar of the galley : 
As the chain gang he quits, which his feelings abhor, 

His home on the mountain, or cot in the valley, 
Looms up on his fancy, with all its fond ties, 

Disseverless still by the wrath of his foes ; 
And the dew drops of gratitude stand in his eyes, 

While throbs his glad bosom with rapturous throes. 

I am free ! shouts the culprit, by justice ordained 

To expiate crime by a villainous durance ; 
But the dungeon bolts forced, and his limbs disenchained, 

He steps from his cell with guilt's double assurance, 
And, alas, with heart hardened and conscience more seared, 

He enters the purlieus of hell yet again, 
There to glut the foul passions with which he was reared, 

Accurst of his God, and detested of men* 

I am free ! breathes the drunkard reformed, in a voice 

Of tremulous tone, but with resolute meaning : 
From the past he with meekness has learned to rejoice, 

While o'er his vile habits the mastery winning. 
As the fount, from a moss cinctured rock gushing out. 

E'er swells in its course as it nears the deep sen, 
Ho his whispers grow louder each day, till the shout 

Rings cheerily forth, I am free ! I am free ! 



(The 6vcut pw of $ximlmwy- 



When wc consider the position of man, whether with regard 
to his individuality, his dependencies on the present, or his 
relations to the future, we enter upon a study, the ampli- 
tude, grandeur, and importance of which not only challenge 
the grasp of the mightiest intellect, but draw largely on our 
moral sympathies : and I may add, in view of the argument 
now to be presented, that if those drafts be dishonored at 
the exchequer of benevolence, terrible will be the woes 
heaped upon the derelict of this generation. 

Among the singularly striking inconsistencies of human 
nature, it is not the least, that while, in generalities, men 
theoretically admit, they nevertheless, in particulars, prac- 
tically deny the evils of intemperance. Contrast before 
them, hi the abstract, the antipodal results of drunkenness 
and sobriety, and they approve the one, and denounce the 
other : exhibit to them the intimate correlations subsisting 
between the object of temperance associations and their 
own personal responsibilities, and they acknowledge the 
virtue of the former, but repudiate the obligatory force of 
the latter. Too often, indeed, they tenaciously cling to a 
pitifully narrow policy, to exonerate themselves, if possible, 
from the equitable demands of the golden rule, and plead 
that no positive precept enjoins this, or prohibits that, course 
of conduct in the use of intoxicants, except to declare exces- 
sive indulgence in such beverages highly sinful. Hence, 
because the statute of total abstinence originated under 



52 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

peculiar circumstances — the sacrilege of Nadab and Abiliu 
— and referred to a particular class — the pontifical hue of 
Aaron — many regard it as of only special application as a 
rule of life ; thus planting themselves upon what has been 
termed, by way of contradistinction, the great law of expe- 
diency : than w T hich, a more fatally delusive doctrine has 
never been deduced, even by the malevolent sophistry of 
the devil himself, from the legislative enactments of Infinite 
Wisdom. Whosoever will critically and candidly investigate 
the strictly logical reasoning of St. Paul on this point, will 
readily perceive that this same law of expediency has all the 
legal force of a " Thus saith the Lord." 

It is commonly, but erroneously, supposed that, when the 
great apostle to the Gentiles fixed the self-denying resolu- 
tion contained in the words, " Wherefore, if meat make my 
brother to offend, I will eat no meat while the world 
standeth, lest I make my brother to offend," he meant that 
his conditionally purposed abstemiousness was founded on 
its expediency alone : and it is therefore inferred, that he 
left others to imitate his charitable example of self-denial, 
or not, as their own views of expediency may suggest or 
dictate. It is worthy, however, of critical observation, that, 
in prefacing the resolution with the causative conjunction, 
"wherefore," he inseparably connected the solemn vow, 
which awaited utterance, with the immutable principle 
enunciated, on the authority of divine inspiration, in the 
preceding verse : " But when ye sin so against the breth- 
ren, and wound their weak conscience, ye sin against 
Christ." 

Now, if to eat meat was to make his brother to offend, 
and if such sin against the brethren was virtually a sin 
against Christ, it follows as an inevitable moral consequence, 
that self-indulgence, even restricted within proper limits, 
though not actually sinful per se (as the divine proscription 
rendered the use of wine and strong drink in the case of Aaron 



THE GKEAT LAW OF EXPEDIENCY. bd 

and his sons), becomes so, nevertheless, from its uninten- 
tionally offensive results, and makes the offender obnoxious 
to the law, tk The soul that sinneth, it shall die": an aphor- 
ism of retributive justice, the inculpatory force of which 
was piously recognized by Solomon when he said, "He 
that sinneth against me, wrongeth his own soul." 

"But," asks one, unwilling to abandon his neutrality, 
even under the pressure of convictions which he cannot 
shake off, cc if I am responsible, individually, to God, my 
country, and my fellows, for the interests of temperance, 
why so strenuously insist that I shall sink my individuality 
in some organization, the sole object of which is to enforce 
by moral suasion, or, if need be, by civil jurisprudence, the 
very principle which my solitary example so unequivocally 
sanctions ? Why not ingenuously admit that my personal 
habits, carrying with them daily illustration of the unques- 
tionable benefits enuring from sobriety, and my personal 
influence thus directed against intemperance of every form 
and grade, the whole orbit of my duty in the matter is 
being conscientiously spanned ? " 

Aye : if only duty could be adequately discharged by 
isolated example, then might you, my brother, plead justi- 
fication in the court of conscience : but conscience is an erring 
umpire at best, and, closing her ear against the caveats of 
inspiration, is sure to render not merely fallible, but falla- 
cious decisions ; and the triple amenability to God, your 
country, and your fellows, winch you just now acknowledged, 
shows how grossly she has misconceived the spirit of the 
great law of expediency ; for that imperatively holds you to 
an avoidance of offence against the brethren as a sin against 
Christ ; to the protection of your country from the general 
spread of an odious vice, the results of which are pauperism, 
crime, and anarchy ; and, as an effective means of accom- 
plishing these high purposes of your being, to the redemp- 
tion of the drunkard from the tyranny of appetite, as well as 



54 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

of his family from the misery to which they are reduced by 
his pernicious habits. 

Expediency, indeed, is a fearful misnomer, invented by 
the subtle casuistry of Satan, to mask Jiis malicious designs 
upon the peace and prosperity of our race. It can be justly 
predicated only of established habits or occasional acts 
which affect our own interests alone ; while every volition of 
life, begetting influences — whether incitant or resistant — 
that go beyond ourselves and involve the well being of 
others, falls under the rule of St. Paul's determination, 
which, as I have shown, had birth in moral obligation, and 
not in mere compassionate option. Even the quality of 
your choice of neutral ground is frightfully damaged by the 
normal intent of that very law of expediency, under color of 
which you seek justification, since it demonstrates how little 
real commiseration for the woes that crowd and crown the 
darksome pathway of the inebriate dwells in your bosom, 
when it moves you not to organized co-operation for their 
present assuagement and radical relief. You recognise, it 
is true, the expediency of the drunkard's prompt alignment 
with some temperance organization, that his vitiated appe- 
tite may be curbed, and his vitiating habits corrected. Nay : 
you take a step still farther in advance, and admit the ex- 
pediency of any one, in danger of being finally overcome 
by the rum fiend, connecting himself with some temperance 
order, for the preservation of health and reputation. 

Such admission is just as far as it goes ; for, as in the 
physical, so in the moral world, "In union there is 
strength." Wherever a social covenant is entered into, a 
confraternity of feeling, as well as of effort, is established, 
which strengthens the purposes of the heart. In institu- 
tions, even, where eleemosynary considerations present the 
most prominent feature of consociation, the kindly sensibil- 
ities of human nature, too frequently enswathed, by isola- 
tion, in the garb of selfishness, are elicited by friendly inter- 



THE GREAT LAW OF EXPEDIENCY. 55 

course, as latent heat is evolved, and kindled into flame, by 
attrition. How much more endearing and enduring the 

tied, intimately inwoven with each other, when the basis of 
the sacred alliance is a benevolence purer than the ethic 
philosophy of Confucius- — the first born of heavenly charity, 
and the honored parent of virtuous deeds ? When the ten- 
drils of such benevolence entwine around kindred souls, they 
knit all together in one living, loving mass, too thoroughly 
compact to admit of easy severance. Strong in his connec- 
tions, each member becomes stronger in himself ; until, 
sensual appetence losing her usurped dominion, the demon 
of the bottle and the bowl has power no longer to enthrall. 
Can you, now, expect the victims of appetite — the slaves 
of habit — to originate and conduct such reformatory 
enterprises, while you persistently maintain a neutrality 
which the great law of expediency, appealed to on behalf of 
your optional rights, ranks, with all the authority of divine 
reprobation, in the same category in the moral world, to 
which natural philosophy assigns the vis ineiiiw of bodies 
in the material universe. In other w T ords, that neutrality 
becomes, from the moral constitution of things, a resistant 
force against temperance reform, the unpropitious 
operation of which none may tell; for who shall prescribe 
the metes and bounds of human influence? The lightly 
pattering raindrop, as it leaps from the bosom of the sum- 
mer cloud, is arrested in its sparkling descent by the 
searing leaf of some sickly shrub or pining plant; hangs 
tremulous, for an instant, on its scolloped edge or extended 
point; and falls, at length, to percolate the thirsty soil 
beneath: but when it has subserved the purpose of its 
distillation, its minutest globule finds ways, by the myste- 
rious agency of omnific will, to the fountain head of yonder 
rivulet, which, in its pearly course, unites with another and 
another of its sister rills, until bubbling brooks, and creeping 
creeks, and rushing rivers, wind along the verdant mead, 



56 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

or force a passage through the mountain gorge, and roll 
their tribute to the heaving main. Who, now, shall calculate, 
as he gazes down into the watery waste of mid ocean, 
plashing ever ceaselessly, whether in calm or storm, how 
far, through the boundlessness of that liquid mass, extends 
the propulsive power or resilient force of the unresting 
droplet from the cloud's embrace ? So, who may tell how 
little short of the outermost circle of universal humanity 
around us shall reach the influence of our lives, whether 
active or passive ? 

Active, or passive — working, or suffering, my brother, 
your position must be, since neutrality is a myth of fancy, 
fabled by the father of lies to delude you, under his menda- 
cious construction of the law of expediency, into becoming 
unconsciously a force of resistance to temperance reform. 
Hence, the onward tide of this glorious movement, at every 
swelling surge of its progress, dashes, in majestic might, 
against your muniments of defence, as so many obstacles 
to its successful career. It were well for you, though 
sorrowful, if only its power were spent in vain upon an 
impregnable buttress; but, ah! me, the inherent visinertice 
that gives semblance of neutrality to your conduct, also 
imparts, at every impaction of your policy by a moral 
power like the temperance cause, gathering momentum as 
it flies, a resilient force to all in contact with you. You 
may ascertain my meaning, and demonstrate the evil of 
your so called neutrality, by placing two pennies side by 
side immediately in rear of, but in contact with, a third, 
which may be held steadily in place by strong pressure of 
the thumb or finger. Then let a fourth be sent forcibly 
sliding along the smooth surface of the table until it strikes 
the latter on the edge opposite the first two, and these will 
be swifty moved away, b}^ transmitted force, from contact 
with the third, even though that be immovable by reason 
of the pressure on it. So may you, fixed in your neutral 



THE OKEAT LAW OF EXPEDIENCY. 57 

position by misconception of the law of expediency! with- 
stand the stern logic of temperance advocates, backed by 
the calls of charity; but, oh, think how your unconscious 
influence drives others from the appointed channel of this 
cleansing Jordan. 

Such associations, moreover, are designed to exert a 
consolidated influence in the establishment of a moral 
principle, which looks not more to individual salvation 
from an odious vice, than to the general good of society. 
Duty, therefore, to your country and your fellows, loudly 
demands your active co-operation with them. However 
men may affect to despise public opinion, it is nevertheless 
susceptible of proof that they are almost universally 
swayed, to a greater or less extent, by its power; more 
particularly when that opinion assumes an organized farm. 
Every one, therefore, w T hose heart throbs with the holy 
impulses of philanthropy — whose eye beams with the 
quenchless radiance of charity over the fallen fortunes of 
the inebriate, or dims with the teardrop of sympathy at 
sight of the crushed relics of domestic endearments, has 
a twofold incentive to unite with us in indignant repudia- 
tion of such construction of the law of expediency as we 
have been reviewing: namely, to increase our numerical 
strength, and to give embodiment and force to a fundament- 
al principle of morality. 

Let me point you to yonder sot, who has wallowed, 
perhaps for years, amid the filth of the public sewers; alike 
the pest of the grogshop, and the curse of a once bright home. 
Who cares now to recognize, in the person of the despised 
inebriate, the honored acquaintance — aye, it may be, the 
esteemed friend — of former days? Fallen, in his own 
estimation, beyond the power of self-redemption, and 
making no effort therefore to retrieve Ins moral fortunes, 
who touches in his bosom, as with magic finger, the hidden 
springs of virtuous desire, and then strikes upon the 



58 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

conscience chords of penitent guilt the encouraging notes 
of reform ? Alas, execrations follow his footsteps by day, 
and plant his pillow with thorns by night. A cuff, per- 
chance, is the salutation he receives as he staggers within 
our domicile ; and a kick the farewell accorded him as he 
reels from our threshold. The only hand extended toward 
him is too often armed with a scourge, merciless in its 
stripes and degrading hi its touch, as the Russian knout or 
the Turkish bastmado. 

Suffer now the question, who, with such a picture before 
him, and with the bitter consequences staring him in the 
face of violating the divine ordinance, "Do not drink wine 
nor strong drink," which, though of special prescription, is 
of universal application; of turning a deaf ear to the 
myriad plaints of maudlin woe ; of thwarting the purpose 
of his own creation, and calling dowTL upon himself the 
awful imprecations thundered, in the triumphal chaunt of 
Deborah, upon the inexcusable neutrality of Meroz : who, 
I ask, will longer plant himself upon the law of expediency, 
in cold indifference to the success of a cause thus loudly 
appealing to the best affections of the human breast. 

Let him who would restrain the outgushing sym- 
pathies of his better nature, encase his heart in the 
frozen habiliments of the Arctic iceberg, upon which, when 
the teardrop of anguish shall have been shed by the 
drunkard's worse than widowed wife, or his more than 
orphaned children, it shall congeal to the hardness of the 
diamond on its native rock ! Let him who would forego 
that ecstatic pleasure, akin to the bliss of the upper world, 
which springs from the performance of beneficent deeds, 
pride himself on the frostwork of a bosom on which the 
rays of divine love, like the coldly pale moonbeam playing 
on the Alpine glacier, may shine forever with unmelting 
power, 



THE GREAT LAW OF EXPEDIENCY. 50 

I envy not thai selfishness, which, like the incxpansive 
philosophy of Diogenes, that knew no world beyond his 
own littlo tub, is so indifferent to a fellow being's fate as to 
withhold the counsel of friendship, when it beholds the 
devotee of Bacchus throw himself recklessly on the Stygian 
tide, from the foul spume of which arc cast forth evils of 
such extraordinary magnitude; nor would I cherish that 
circumscribed philanthropy, which, like the religion of the 
Levite, that acknowledged no fraternal ties save those 
which bound together his own peculiar tribe, looks with 
loathing on an object of commiser?„tioh, and passes by on 
the other side : rather let my heart glow with the saintly 
charity of the good Samaritan, which recognizes in every 
man a brother, and w T hich, when it sees one lying on the 
highway, robbed of his substance, and wounded in reputa- 
tion, by the Jericho bandits of intemperance, stoops to 
raise the fainting sufferer, and carries him to the Lodge, the 
Division, or the Temple of Honor, as an asylum from the 
demons that prow T l around his path by day, and people 
the world of his visions by night. 



m Eottft-fetw. 



Fierce Euroclydon is blust'ring, 
And the storm king dark is niust'ring 
Wrathful spirits, round him clust'ring 

Murky ills to rouse ? 
Earth and sky, with tumult rife, 
Threat'ning war on limb and life, 
Frontlets hind of angry strife 

On their beetling brows. 

Lightly first the raindrops patter, 
Heavy next the hailstones clatter, 
Hurtling blasts then widely scatter 

Trophies of their pow'r ; 
Down the teeming torrents clash, 
Luridly the lightnings flash, 
Stunningly the thunders crash, 

Bidding nature cow'r. 

'Mid the elemental battle, 
Chimneys tumble, windows rattle, 
Pillars totter, floors unsettle, 

O'erstrained rafters bend : 
Widening chinks admit the blast, 
Frightened children crouch aghast, 
Clinging to their mother fast— 

, She can not defend ! 

■ ■ 
She, herself, now needs protection. 
But, alas, her youth's affection, 
Erring in its predilection, 

Seeks support in vain : 
Husband longer hath she not— 
Wife and children all forgot, 
Reels he to and fro a sot, 

Madness in his brain. 



TIIK NOKTH-EASTER. 61 

llisc the ghosts of lovos neglected, 
Echo vow? in youth respected, 
GHeam the joys by hope projected— 

Charm thoy not his soul : 
Love, and truth, and joy he finds, 
Only where tho demon binds 
Conscience fast, and reason blinds— 

In the poisoned bowl. 

Grief may shed of tears a river, 
Bleeding hearts with pain may quiver, 
Injured ones with cold may shiver, 

When the North-Wind blows : 
They may sink in deep disgrace, 
Want may stare them in the face, 
Health and life may wane apace— 

Heeds he not their woes. 

If the picture be a true one, 

Oh, by love divine and human, 

Childhood pity— pity woman- 
Dare for them be brave I 

Though the storm thou canst not hush, 

Bid their tears no longer gush, 

To the drunkard's rescue rush, 

Sire and husband save 1 



Mxt gmmhj €\\\h 



Once more, with the morn, the family cup ! 

What are its comforts ? What its joys ? 
The father, the mother, eagerly sup, 

Delicate girls and hardy boys ; 
And even the babe with dimpled cheek, 

Strangled at first with sugared dregs, 
Too early has learned with smiles to speak— 

Words it has none, yet more it begs. 

All bravely goes round the family cup ! 

What doth it promise ? What perform ? 
To raise from despair the heart-stricken up? 

Shield from the tempest ? Calm the storm ? 
Alas, what delusion ! It naught but lies 

Pours in the ear from birth till death : 
A Lazarus' wants it ne'er supplies, 

Ne'er it prolongs a Dives' breath. 

Morn's curse, then, upon the family cup ! 

Ruin and woe are found within : 
When infancy's lured its sweets to sup, 

Parents entail a deadly sin. 
No wonder when youth's to manhood grown. 

Sorrowing then makes no amends ; 
For honor, and peace, and health, all flown, 

Premature death the drama ends. 

Dash— dash to the ground the family cup ! 

Mother ! beware thou mix it not ; 
Ere long it will blight maternal hope, 

Branding thy child a loathsome sot : 
And, oh, if with life thou wouldst not toy, 

Father ! withhold the sugared spoon : 
The pride of thy manly heart, thy boy, 

Lessons of guilt may learn too soon, 



<Thc flupc of fashion. 



Launched on life's deceitful ocean, 

With the joys that hope first gave. 
Youth is borne, with gentle motion, 

Onward by the crested wave, 
Little thinking hope is truthless, 
Never dreaming tempests ruthless 

May his fragile barque assail. 

And o'er joy and love prevail. 

Darkly soon the heavens lower, 

Presage dire of evil nigh; 
Sweeps the gale with fearful power. 

Rise the billows mountain high : 
Yet his soul to dread a stranger, 
Reckless of impending danger, 

At the storm king's wrath ne'er emails 

Crowds he still his snowy sails. 

By the maelstrom of temptation 

Drawn within the ceaseless whirl, 
T- w'rd the vortex each gyration 

Of the roaring waters hurl 
That frail barque, with all it beareth 
Prized by him who madly dareth, 

Till beneath dishonors wave. 

Sinks he to an early grave. 

First, the dupe of sinful fashion, 
Light the tempting cup he tastes ; 

Then, the victim doomed of passion, 
O'er the bowl his all he wastes : 

Thirst by daily draughts renewing, 

Drinks he to his own undoing- 
Lives unloved, despised, P 



mm of m m*t $»jr. 



Although Charles II., on occasion of a royal dinner given 
in honor of the Earl of Kochester, at which were present 
the queen, the court chaplain, and several ministers of state, 
could flippantly employ — despite the incredulity of his 
queenly consort, who regarded the quotation as little less 
than blasphemy, and the grossly culpable ignorance of the 
chaplain, who deemed the words an unwarrantable interpol- 
ation of the sacred record — the metaphorical language used 
by Jotham on behalf of the vine, in his elegant allegory of 
the forest coronation (Judges ix. 8-15), as a warranty for 
post-prandial indulgence — " Give us a generous glass of 
' wine which cheereth God and man ' " ; and although the 
apologists of festal enjoyment, and even the defenders of 
bacchanalian revels, shamelessly claim the high authority 
of the royal quotation for their demoralizing practices, yet 
a just interpretation of the passage will expose, not the 
miserable sophistry only, but the inexcusable iniquity as 
well, that seeks, in the exhilarating qualities predicated of 
wine, a subterfuge of lies to screen from universal obloquy 
the habitual use of intoxicating beverages. 

To say nothing of the marked difference between unadul- 
terated wine and distilled spirits, or, rather — to speak in 
better accord with the literal sense of the language cited — 
between the unfermented juice of the grape and the alco- 
holic compounds of the present day, not a syllable in the 
phrase, " which cheereth God and man," can be construed. 



OHEEB OF THE WINE CUr. . G5 

by any legitimate method of deduction, into the shadow of 
a license for daily potations of spirituous, or even vinous 
liquors ; much less, for their immoderate or excessive use. 
It may, indeed, cheer the reeling inebriate to fancy himself 
rich as Dives, wise as Solomon, or strong as Samson ; but 
in what kindred sense — if it be not impious to ask the ques- 
tion, even — may it be said that wine cheereth God? 

Search must be made for the true significance of this 
singular language among the rites of the Levitical code. 
From the history of the confirmation of these by Moses, 
after Iris descent from the heights of Abarim, in the presence 
of his successor Joshua, and of Eleazar, the successor of 
Aaron, we learn that the holocausts, or morning and even- 
ing sacrifices, as well as special sin offerings, w^ere accom- 
panied by a libation of wine upon the altar. 

Now, as these sacrifices, both regular and occasional, were 
divinely instituted types of the grand atoning sacrifice of 
Christ, and as wine w r as to become, by his own eucharistic 
appointment, the sacramental symbol of his blood, "shed 
for the remission of sins," we are prepared to comprehend 
how, and to appreciate why, it was said, by anticipative 
inspiration, that wine "cheereth God and man." God's 
justice is cheered, so to speak, by the full satisfaction of its 
inexorable claims ; his mercy, by the gracious pardon se- 
cured to repentant sinners ; and his love, by the sanctifi- 
cation wrought in their unholy nature : while man's faith 
is cheered by a realizing remembrance of the purpose of 
Emmanuel's sufferings; and his hope by the "exceeding 
great and precious promises " made by Jesus — of all which 
cheering results of the atonement by the Lamb of God, 
the wine of the eucharist is both the memorial and the 
pledge. 

How much color, now, of approbation do the words of 
Jotham, thus legitimately interpreted, or, indeed, any 
cognate passage of Holy Writ, lend to the disgraceful rev- 



66 - TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

eiries of the festal celebration, or to even the moderate 
use of intoxicating beverages ? No more than did the im- 
posing solemnities of the Last Supper — an ordinance in- 
stituted solely as a perpetual memento of Christ's passion 
and death on behalf of a guilty world — give countenance 
to those Grecian usages, borrowed from the festival of 
Plutus and other mythologic divinities, which, by sacri- 
legious engrafture upon the ritual of our holy Christianity, 
led to the drunken, as well as gluttonous profanation of 
the eucharistic ceremony in the Corinthian church, and 
which elicited the indignant reprimand administered by 
St. Paul (ICor. xi. 22). 

To such as are accustomed to view the habitual use of 
intoxicants in a philosophic light, it would seem almost an 
unnecessary waste of time and effort to essay the proof that 
the practice is an evil of unmitigated character: yet there 
are many who sincerely regard, and more who affect to 
believe, their moderate, occasional, and even dietetic 
employment not merely harmless, but beneficial; not con- 
sidering the ever downward tendency, and ultimately 
fearful effects, of such a practice. 

It is true, the temporary stimulus which spirituous, 
vinous, or malt liquors impart, for the time being increases 
the corporeal strength; but this is ever followed by a 
degree of languor exactly proportionate to the previous 
exaltation of the animal powers, and is almost universally 
accompanied by such dissipation of mind, and such physical 
indisposition for the ordinary pursuits of life, that the 
active duties of the farm, the workshop, the counting 
house, and the professional office, are at first ignored, and 
eventually loathed. The fences of the agriculturist are 
neglected, his crops untended, and his orchards unpruned. 
The blacksmith's bellows hush the roar of their kindling 
blast, and his forge presents but smouldering embers, or 
blackened cinders. The carpenter's bench no longer 



OHBBB <>l THE wrNE CUP. 07 

answers to the measured stroke of his well plied mallet, the 
grating sound of his handsaw, or the whistling rush of his 
jack plana. The lapstone of the shoemaker no more 
rebounds beneath the quick tap of his ringing hammer; his 
boot tree hangs idly on its accustomed peg; and his kit 
lies scattered around in rusty -confusion. The journal of 
the accountant stands unposted, and his ledger unbalanced. 
The massive volumes that crowd tho library of the doctor 
or the lawyer arc covered with the mouldy dust of weeks — 
perhaps, of months. In fine, where once the cheerful buzz 
of enterprising industry enlivened the scene, silence now 
sways his sceptre in all the gloom of his death like reign. 

Were we to restrict our investigations to a mere etymo- 
logical analysis of the term used to denote the proximate 
effects of these beverages, w^e should find, hi that one word 
alone, enough to deter any man, not already the willing 
dupe of his own sensual propensities, from criminally 
indulging a sordid appetence at the twofold expense of 
body and soul. That word is c "intoxication," derived from the 
Greek, to$ix(')i> j — a poison — used, according to Dioscorides, 
for smearing the heads of ancient war arrows: and who 
that has witnessed the physical — to say nothing of the 
mental or moral effects of inebriating liquors — but must 
acknowledge the terrible appositeness of the term ? 

Alas, almost without concern, w^e look upon the annual 
passing away of thirty-one millions and a half of our fellows 
into the unknown world. We even stand on the uttermost 
verge of mortality's bleak shore, laved by the swelling waters 
of Jordan, and gaze listlessly upon the index of destiny, as 
it moves ever onward over the dial plate of time; and at 
each vibration of the massive pendulum that gives motion 
to the clock work of universal life, another and another 
drops into the tide beneath : nay, the turbid waves plash 
at our very feet, and chill us with their spray; and still the 
derisive laugh of our merriment rings out above the seeth- 



68 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

iiig stream below, whose sullen surges knell the death of 
sixty thousand drunkards annually. 

" Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return," are 
solemn words, not only teaching our origin and pointing 
our doom, but, as well, demonstrating the strangely com- 
posite nature of our animal organism, the material structure 
of which, and the normal conditions of its being, favor the 
idea of protracted existence; for, as the dust of the ground 
is but an admixture of the detritus of every material 
substance, ground — as, probably, the phrase implies — into 
atomic particles, wliich intermingle in one impalpable 
powder, so hi bone and muscle, tendon and cartilage, 
ligament and nerve, artery and vein, brain, and heart, and 
lungs of the human fabric, is found every individual 
substance of which the earth is built: so that the physical 
forces which speed the planets in their whirl through space, 
which stir the nethermost currents of ocean in their tidal 
movements, and which drive the terraqueous sphere on 
winch we dwell around her appointed circuit, also pulse in 
the bounding blood, course along the nervous cords, control 
the centres of assimilation, and give the faculty of locomo- 
tion. Hence, in the vital essences that permeate the human 
system may be studied the profoundest lessons of all 
mathematics and mechanics — of all science and art — which 
impart to intellect its power, to genius its light, and to 
cunning its skill. 

There is, therefore, as much of truth as of poetry in the 
conception that assigns to man's framework, as the crown 
piece of God's handicraft — designed, in the economy of 
redemptive grace, to become the temple of his own habita- 
tion — the distinctive title of " a microcosm;" for lime, that 
crystallizes into adamantine hardness in the granite quartz, 
strengthens his bones; iron, that furnishes in its varied 
employment a test of civilization, and possesses so great 
capacity for caloric as to require intense heat for its fusion, 



GHBEB OF tin. WINE CUP. 69 

Mows liquid in liis blood; flint, that weaves no flexile 
filament in its solid structure, waves in the locks of his 

silken hair; sulphur, that imparts to the springs of Vir- 
ginia and the waters of Harrowgate the smell and taste of 
rotten eggs, and phosjniorus, that emits its pale gleam from 
the foulness of actual putrescence, both quiver in his fleshy 
tissues : and with these durable materials lending their own 
inherent power of resistance to the physical constitution of 
man, what ground for other fancy than that this micro- 
cosm should enjoy a longevity limited only by the appoint- 
ment of God ? 

As if in answer to this question, M. Flourens seems to 
consider the normal conditions of our being as fully 
warranting an affirmative conclusion; since he holds that 
men not only die earlier than they should, but that it is 
thek fault that the average of human life is but sixty years, 
as well as that centenarians, at the present day, are the 
exceptions to this rule, as was demonstrated by the 
researches of Quetelet and Smits, who, when pursuing 
their investigations into the production of life and the rates 
of mortality, found that in Belgium, with a population 
numbering over four millions, only fourteen reached the 
age of a hundred years, while but two had spanned a 
hundred and ten years of life. 

With this statement and these statistics before us, the 
further question presents itself, Does the prolongation of 
life defend on man himself? To which it maybe answered, 
In onc^ sense, no : in another, yes. Every man is born 
with a certain capacity for life, which must naturally ex- 
tend to a period, determined beforehand, when its extinc- 
tion is necessitated by the very law of our being. This 
peiiod was alluded to by the pious philosopher of Idumea, 
when he asked, "Is there not an appointed time to man 
upon earth?" and again when he said, "His days are de- 
termined, the number of his months are with thee, thou 



70 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

hast appointed his bounds that lie can not pass ; " and en- 
tertaining such views of life, the patient sufferer of Uz 
voiced his resignation thus : " All the days of my appointed 
time will I wait, till my change come." In this sense, 
therefore, it is not within the province of man to prolong 
his existence, or to enlarge the rights of living received at 
birth ; but he may be said to lengthen life, if he take due 
precaution against accidents which would suddenly term- 
inate its course, or even if he avoid those influences which 
more or less gradually diminish the vital energy that main- 
tains it. Hence, morality, hygiene, and the general con- 
stitution — subjects, all, of human volition and action — will 
undoubtedly affect the duration of life. 

Despite, nevertheless, all the conservative forces latent 
in the elements of man's materiality, and manifested in the 
normal laws of his physiology, the vital essence that an- 
imates the human organism, and holds in wonderful abey- 
ance those chemical affinities and repulsions which tend to 
the lesion of its functions and the disorganization of its 
tissues, is neutralized in its health giving and life preserv- 
ing qualities by the habitual use of intoxicants, which are 
all, whether spirituous, vinous, or malt liquors, poisonous 
in their nature, and fatal in then effects, as exemplified in 
the annual mortality of sixty thousand victims of intemper- 
ance. 

Cheer of the wine cup ! Just such cheer as animates the 
vengeful bosom of the Cheyenne or Ogallalla brave, when, 
around the council fire, his face besmeared with streaks of 
dirty paint, and a horrid garniture of foenien's scalps dang- 
ling from his belt, he wildly dances to the music of the war 
whoop, as if he scented from afar the reeking gore of the 
pale face : aye, such cheer as inspired the Borgias, father 
and son, when, through the fatal blunder of an under butler, 
they drained from flasks prepared for then cardinal guests 
the potent cantardle, which converted the Vatican chamber 



OHEEB OF THE WINE CUP. 71 

of Alexander VI. into a vestibule of the eharnel, whence 
Cbeear escaped only through the indefatigable exertions of 
the pontifical physicians. There is poison in the wine cup 
that incites to fearful deeds the harpies of passion — poison 
that destroys all vestiges of manhood — poison that feeds 
the maw of death — poison that preys forever, with the fire 
tongue of "the worm that dieth not," upon the soul itself! 



& %trfmmt Wm, 



In joy's bounding gladness 

, The wine cup I've quaffed ; 
In grief's darkling sadness 

I've turned to its draught : 
To joy it ne'er yielded 

Of increase a grain, 
And grief it ne'er shielded 

From one shaft of pain. 



To Moslem as Mecca, 

Jerus'lern to Jew, 
To Isaac Rebecca, 

So vines to my view ; 
My hope's bright connections, 

My memories dear, 
My heart's fond affections, 

Concentred all here. 



The vineyard my temple, 

The wine press my shrine, 
My rosary ample 

Grape-beads from the vine, 
My soul's adoration 

To Bacchus was paid, 
And daily oblation 

Devoutly was made. 



Like gathering samphire 

Where rolls the dark flood, 

Or sleeping where vampyre 
But battens on blood, 



\ BBOB \i;i i ». VOW, 73 

There*s danger in tasting 

The goblet} though bright ; 
Life's energies wasting 

Beneath its fell blight. 



The bowl, then, of Circe 

I dash from my Lip : 
The act is self morcy — 

'Tis death but to sip. 
Relying, like Jacob, 

On power divine, 
Tho life pledge of Rochab 

Henceforward be mine. 



JtfftM $tttutm$. 



The bottle ! 'tis but the dread fountain of woe, 

From whose depths darkly rises man's deadliest foe, 

Who, as Pallas sprang perfect from Jupiter's brain. 

So is armed from his birth with the scourge and the chain. 

The wine cup ! beware, for the gleam of its light 
Is deceitful, although than the ruby more bright : 
It allures by its glare but to sorrow and shame, 
And enkindles on earth Tophet's premature flame. 

The dram shop ! an open league chamber of vice, 
Where the pleasures of sense of the soul is the price ; 
Where alliance is formed with the demon of woe, 
AVhile the deed of enslavement's recorded below. 

The fallen! oh, what a deplorable fate, 
Thus to forfeit the bliss of man's lofty estate : 
All the high aspirations of hope, too, to hush, 
And the loves of his youth to dissever and crush. 

Thecharnol! all darkness! ah, pitiless doom, 
Unlamented to sink to the drunkard's foul tomb, 
Whither, mourning, no friends sadly follow the bier, 
Where esteem plants no rose, and where love sheds no tear. 

For ever ! how long, oh, how long to be curst 
With the wrath which from God on the drunkard shall burst, 
And in vain strive to hide from the bolts that are sped, 
All eternity through, on his shelterless head. 

The life pledge ! therein is salvation, in sooth, 
For the toper of years and the scarce sipping youth : 
Lo, the banner's unfurled— 'tis the ensign of love- 
in its folds nestles peace, viet'ry perches above. 



ptmt's gcvcvagc. 



Joy to the universe ! dawneth salvation 

O'er the dark pitfalls where death lay concealed, 

Teaching the libertine, 'mid his temptation, 

Man needs no bev'rage the fount doth not yield. 

Banished be Alcohol, henceforth, forever ! 

Vain he essays his dread sceptre to wield : 
Loosed is his prisoner— bound be he never— 

Man needs no bev'rage the fount doth not yield. 

Friend of the fallen one, mighty and fearless 
Now be thy effort the suff 'ring to shield : 

Whisper the debauchee, outcast and cheerless, 

Man necd3 no bev'rage the fount doth not yield. 

Come, poor inebriate, oh, do not tarry 

"Where to the god of wine long thou hast kneeled : 

Oh, break the tempter's spell— hell's weapon parry- 
Man needs no bev'rage the fount doth not yield. 

Wife of the bacchanal, cease from thy sorrow, 
Now be the depths of thy bitter tears sealed : 

Garments of joyousness hope hence may borrow, 
Man needs no bev'rage the fount doth not yield. 

Child of the dissolute, hungry and tattered, 
List how the shout of thy rescue is pealed : 

Rise from thy wretchedness— be thy gloom scattered- 
Man needs no bev'rage the fount doth not yield. 



$M$tw&$ tfjuol. 



While Christmas bumpers deep are quaffed, 

And Yule night revels kept, 
Be ours the more delicious draught 

From Horeb's rock that leapt. 

Let topers hiccup songs obscene, 

And pass the ribald jest : 
We, cheerful, sing the joys serene 

In temperance possessed. 

Let Bacchus spread the festal board, 
With brimmers drowning sense : 

From nature's sweet canteen— the gourd— 
We'll drink to abstinence. 

Ye fair, on whom rum's evils fall 

Like sword of double edge- 
Young men and old— come one, come all, 

And join our Christmas pledge.' 

To water pledge ! Distilled of God, 

No demon 's in its foam : 
It gives a character abroad, 

And happiness at home. 



(The imminent WttiA of (Our Ration. 



Our revolutionary sires, in consummating that glorious 
work the foundation of which was laid in the Declaration of 
Independence, adopted for the infant nation a form of 
government fashioned after the model of Infinite Wisdom. 
He, ever observing the eternal fitness of things, as well in 
the primordial atoms of matter as in the most finished 
mechanism of his creative skill — as well in the structure of 
subordinate empires as hi the exercise of his own absolute 
sovereignty — provided, in the patriarchal and judicial poli- 
ties of the Israelites, republican types of government as 
general patterns for the civil institutions of all other peoples : 
and although Saul, the first king of Israel was consecrated 
to the regal office by Samuel, the last of the Jewish judges, 
by divine appointment, yet the change from a democratic 
polity to a monarchical dynasty was none the less a manifest 
sin against God ; and was allowed by him who guides the 
destiny of nations as a means of chastising rebellious am- 
bition : and as if to illustrate how little he regards the aris- 
tocratic claims of all human ranks, castes, and orders, he 
designated the son of the plebeian Kish as the father of 
their future kings. 

Now, it is a remarkable historic fact, sorrowfully exem- 
plifying the evils of intemperance, and well worthy of spe- 
cial consideration by every well-wisher of our favored 
republic, that the very first invasion of personal liberty and 
►nal independence which ever occurred, was closely 



78 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

connected with the vice of drunkenness as its exciting 
cause. 

When the dark, surging waters of the deluge again sought 
their hiding places, whence they had been invoked by the 
will of Deity for their work of destruction, one of the first 
lessons impressed on the mind of the fearless Mariner of the 
Flood, was the sinfulness of converting a healthful fruit of 
Heaven's provision into a liquid poison of man's invention, 
and the extreme danger of tampering with so treacherous 
a spirit as dances on its sparkling bead. A taste — a sip — 
a hearty draught of the wine from his own vineyard, and 
the patriarch's drunken ' nakedness was exposed to the 
scornful eye of Ham. The deriding son, for his grievous 
mockery of a father's shame, was made a " servant of ser- 
vants " under Shem and Japheth, when, in the fullness of 
time, the couchant Lion of the Tribe of Judah sprang from 
his lair, at the bidding of Israel's God, and rent in pieces 
the Canaanitish populace of Jerusalem. 

In the Bible — a sacred repository of the archives of de- 
populated cities, crumbled thrones, and ruined empires — 
we have striking illustrations of the devastating evils of this 
vice, in the comparative ease with which, through the malign 
instrumentality of the intoxicating bowl, revolutions are 
induced, or consummated, that not only bring into actual 
collision the antagonizing elements of domestic government, 
but also stir, to their central depths, the polities of neigh- 
boring nations, and rouse the slumbering hostility of rival 
kingdoms ; sending the wild waves of political commotion, 
crested with anarchy, to the uttermost verge of civilization. 

After Solomon, through sinful dalliance with the strange 
wives he had taken, departed from the living God, worship- 
ing Ashtoreth of the Sidonians, Chemosh of the Moabites, 
and Molech of the sons of Amnion, he saw his mighty do- 
minion riven, for his foul idolatry, b}^ the intestine feuds of 
Hadad, Hadadezer, and Jeroboam ; which, at length, re- 



THE IMMINENT TERIL OF OUR NATION. 79 

suited in the two rival kingdoms of Judali and Israel. Jero- 
boam, who reigned over the ten revolted tribes (1 Kings 
xii. 20), set up golden images in Bethel and Dan ; and his 
house, in turn, was overthrown in the person of his son 
Nadab. To the latter succeeded Baasha, whose son Elah, 
reigning after his father, fell a victim to the dreadful vice 
of intemperance (1 Kings xvi. 9, 10) ; while his fatal day of 
debauchery paved the way for rampant usurpation to rend 
the kingdom of Israel with civil wars, diabolical assassin- 
ations, and their usual attendants, famine and pestilence, 
w T hich rioted, by turns, in all their horrors, throughout the 
lengthened course of four hundred years, until the final 
extinction of the kingdom, and the dispersion of the tribes 
over Assyria. 

"While, moreover, the weeping daughters of Israel crouch 
around the still smoking embers of their long loved homes, 
fancying they can yet hear, above the roar of devouring 
flames, the horrid crackling of their children's burning 
bones, and mourning, most of all, that they shall no more, 
forever, tread the hallowed courts of Jehovah's house, and 
bend in holy worship at the mercy shrine, beneath the 
overshadowing wings of the cherubim, they are summoned, 
by the blast of the victor's bugle, to the far off land of 
Assyria; and Babylon the Great, already overgrown in 
pomp and pride, rose the higher for the fall -of Jerusalem: 
but the sacred spoils of her impious conquests were 
destined to become the instruments of her own ruin. 

For seventy long years had she been filling up the capa- 
cious measure of her iniquity; and Omnipotence, all that 
time, w T as steadily mixing the wine cup of his wrath. When 
the last drop was added that filled it to the brim, a thou- 
sand of Babylon's most noble were gathered in the 
banqueting rooms of Belshazzar, to join the jubilant 
carousal of their king. 



80 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

Ah, little deemed they, as, oft and again, they drained 
the exhilarating bowl, that they surfeited on the life blood 
of an empire: nor even when the golden chalices, pillaged 
from the sacristy of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar, flashed 
back the dazzling light from the chandeliers upon the snowy 
walls, and revealed the noiseless movements of a spirit 
hand, writing there the death warrant of both host and 
guest, did they comprehend the bitter import of that 
blazing scroll. 

Vain was the spell fraught art of the magi to summon 
from the unknown world, to audience of the king, some 
ghostly interpreter of the cabalistic characters : vain the 
profoundest lore of the sage Chaldee to fathom the myste- 
ries of the symbolic inscription : vain the vaunted prescience 
of the astrologer to read the fire lettered page of the 
imperial horoscope. He who wrote, alone could read : yet 
when even he spoke, through the captive Daniel, the 
impending calamities of Assyria, the fearful fiat fell upon 
ears obtunded by the sfcupefactive power of the prolonged 
debauch : nor were the princely revelers startled from their 
fatal orgies until the battle cry of Cyrus, leading on his 
serried cohorts through the drained channel of the 
Euphrates, rang along the unguarded avenues of the city, 
and was shouted back by the war bred satraps of Darius, 
advancing from the opposite side. Then, indeed, rushed 
they to the mortal strife; but, maddened by their revels, 
and weakened by excess, it was only to leap mto the open 
arms of death, and to leave in the gore drenched gateway 
the mangled corpse of their drunken king (Dan. v. 30, 31.) 

Such, alas, was the finale of the feast — the fulfilment of 
the Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin ! The woe drugged wine 
cup at once the type and the cause of the kingdom's 
desolation. 

Even the magnificent empire, celebrated for its surpass- 
ing pomp and splendor, which was subsequently founded 



TIIE IMMINENT PERIL OF OUR NATION. 81 

by the Medio-lVrsiau conqueror upon the ruins of Babylon, 
and which stood unmoved during the space of two hundred 
and six years, became, in the reign of Darius Codomanus, 
incorporated among the conquests of Alexander the Great; 
only that these, in turn, might swell the dark catalogue of 
thrones subverted by intemperance. Alexander, who had 
succeeded to the sceptre of Macedon at the early age of 
twenty years, and forthwith subdued Greece; who boasted 
of lineal descent from the invulnerable Achilles, as his 
father had before proclaimed himself the son of Jupiter 
Amnion; who seemed to have been crowned by the God- 
dess of Victory, on the banks of the Granicus, with laurels 
that would never sere; w T ho traversed the deserts of Lybia, 
overran Egypt, and penetrated to the Ganges; who left, 
amid the barren w r astes of Africa, municipal centres of 
industrial art, as some reparation of the dreadful havoc 
made by the march of his thundering legions, and as 
monuments of his unequaled glory; even he, at length, 
gave up his w T orld wide empire to unbridled anarchy, as he 
forfeited Iris life of kingly triumph, through the sateless 
voracity of this cormorant vice. 

Enough, however, of historic illustration, as deduced 
from the annals of the classic past : let us more specially 
examine how intemperance operates national detriment in 
the present age and in our own loved land ; particularly 
since legislation on the subject, even for a restriction of the 
sale of intoxicating liquors by excise laws, and, much more, 
for the entire suppression of this demoralizing traffic by 
prohibitory enactments, is ranked by politicians, for reasons 
of then* own, as the revival of a sumptuary code, and es- 
teemed by an unenlightened constituency an infringement 
of their liberty : and never wae a specious sophism more 
adroitly addressed to American citizens than this. 

Never was the thrilling word, liberty, dearer to the an- 
cient republics of Greece and Rome — never sounded it more 



82 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

sweetly to the ears of the baronial lords who forced the 
magna charta of British rights from the reluctant King John 
at Runnyroede — never was it more animating to the heroes 
of revolutionary memory — than to us, after its enjoyment 
for now nearly an entire century, and the blood written 
avouchment, within the last decade, of universal freedom. 
Hence, the incorrigible repugnance of every native of "the 
land of the free and the home of the brave " to any abridg- 
ment of his personal rights ; and hence, too, the success of 
this argument when addressed to liberty loving Americans : 
yet strange, passing strange, that sons of sires who achieved 
independence not by a bloodless revolution, like that of the 
French republicans of 1848, but won their freedom at can- 
non's mouth and point of sword, — strange, I say, that de- 
scendants of such patriots, themselves in turn dooming 
slavery to a gory grave, should forget that the very first 
gyves ever prepared by Great Britain for her colonial sub- 
jects in America, were suggested by the tyranny of that fell 
spirit whose throne is the still cap, and whose sceptre the 
guaging rod. 

So far back in the commercial history of this continent as 
1709, some New England traders, observing large quantities 
of molasses thrown out, as useless, from the West India 
sugar houses, caused it to be purchased and shipped to 
Boston, where it was manufactured into rum. The experi- 
ment soon became lucrative, and, extending to the Dutch 
and Danish colonies, it cut off the imports from the British 
islands, of which they complained in 1715. To prevent the 
practice, a duty of sixpence was imposed, in 1733, on 
molasses brought into the English colonies from foreign 
ports ; but the Yankees, with characteristic shrewdness, 
evaded its payment, to enforce which, eventually, a British 
fleet — the first that ever menaced the American settlements 
in support of parliamentary taxation— was sent over ; and 



THE IMMINENT PERIL OF oUK NATION. 813 

this resulted in violent conflicts, extending from that time 
down to the commencement of the war of the revolution. 

To the same evil genius may also be attributed the first 
outcropping ever known in our glorious Union of that re- 
bellious spirit, which, when full fledged, becomes the 
scourge of a nation — civil war. Pennsylvania, being a grain 
growing country, made her agricultural resources, as early 
as 1794, tributary to the manufacture of whiskey, distilleries 
of which had, even at that date, been erected at numerous 
points in the few States which then composed our now 
powerful republic. Congress, for the prevention of this 
worse than wanton w T aste of breadstuff's, imposed a duty on 
spirits manufactured at home, but its collection was resisted 
vi et armis in four of the western counties of Pennsylvania ; 
and nothing but the resolute energy of Washington, then 
president of the infant nation, demonstrated, as it was, by 
the immediate despatch of a military force to suppress the 
rebels against the legislative authority of the United States, 
succeeded in quelling that first indication of civil war, now 
known in our national history as " The Whiskey Insurrec- 
tion." 

Shall we then, lovers of independence by tradition, and 
freemen by inheritance, enshrine, as a household divinity 
of individual liberty, the fiery angel of the swill tub, which 
sought to throw around our colonial rights the first galling 
fetters of foreign despotism — then struck upon the inaug- 
ural altar of our republican independence, the first spark 
that ignited the sacrificial flames of rebellion — and now 
would fain delude us to an infamous sepulture of all most 
sacred to us and ours ? 

It is matter of astonishment, that, in this birth place of 
universal freedom, and in this age of patriotic sentiment, 
with such vast monuments around us of the wide spread 
devastations of this Goth-like invader, excuses should be 
framed for not enlisting in the crusade against him, until 



84 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

the dove of temperance shall every where nestle with the 
eagle of liberty among the peaceful folds of the Star Span- 
gled Banner : and yet I know not why it should beget sur- 
prise. There were those, ninety-four years ago, in " the 
time that tried men's souls," who stood aloof from the 
patriots of that age, and avowed themselves partisans of 
the royal George: so it is but in accordance with "the 
course of human events," that some should now not only 
decline any active participation in the grand temperance 
movement, but even advocate what they term, mistakenly, 
a rational indulgence of appetite. 

Under this false guise, the very interests which we, as re- 
publicans, hold most dear, are attacked by a foe, who, if 
his fearful progress be not stayed by the casemated muni- 
ments of moral suasion, surmounted by the long range ar- 
tillery of legal power, will soon, like the battailous hosts of 
Macedon, overrun the world : whose forced marches, like 
those of the first Napoleon, know no physical barriers in 
the snow capped peaks of the Alps, or the furnace heats of 
Africa : who, though he meet us not with the bristling 
bayonet and the booming cannon, yet employs, in his 
savage raids, the lasso of the Mexican guerilla, or the gleam- 
ing stiletto of the Italian brigand : whose policy may seem 
vacillating as that of England's second Charles, but whose 
rule is despotic as that of Switzerland's inhuman Gesler ; 
whose strategy is wily as that of the treacherous Seminole, 
whose purpose is fixed as that of the thwartless Apache, 
and whose cruelty barbarous as that of the merciless 
Camanche. 

This subtle foe, like the nomadic Bedouin, is of a wild 
and tameless spirit, alike visiting, in his predatory incur- 
sions, the curtained mansion of the millionnaire and the 
ungarnished ingleside of the toil worn peasant : alike blast- 
ing the sustaining comforts of the hoary, and the blooming 
hopes of the youthful : alike enslaving the gloomy and the 



Tin: IMMINENT teril of our nation. 85 

gay ; granting a runic armistice to the temporizing only 
that he may return to the onslaught with redoubled fury, 
and finish the work of death on his already disabled victims. 
In other words, he displays his truce flag only that he may 
the more surely decoy within range of his masked batteries 
the too conservative friend of temperance — the moral sua- 
sionist who shrinks from the responsibility of legal coercion 
— and thus fix upon the moderate drinker the fearful fate 
of the drunkard. 

Which way soever we turn, wc may trace the footsteps of 
the marauder, who, with bloated limbs and idiot stare, ob- 
trudes into every lane of life his hateful presence. He drives 
the trade of the hamlet, and sways the traffic of the commer- 
cial mart. He holds the dark lantern of the lottery office, 
and manages the fancy colored pyrotechnics of the gambling 
saloon. He feeds upon the living ligaments of friendship, 
and laps the life blood of love. He preys, with the beak of 
the Promethean vulture, upon the pulsing heart of humanity. 
He gains entrance into the senate chamber and the cabinet 
council, and confounds the concentrated wisdom of the 
nation. He worms himself into the cherished sanctity of 
the pulpit, and gluts himself with the consolidated piety of 
the Christian church. Like the pontifex maximus of a demon 
hierarchy demanding the homage of both body and soul, he 
sits enthroned, in the " pretty waiter girl " saloon, upon the 
whiskey cask, a guaging rod the sceptre of his temporal power, 
and the wine cup the baptismal font of his spiritual des- 
potism. The warrant of the drunkard's bankruptcy is the 
trophy of his greedy conquest ; the maniacal ravings of the 
dying sot, the Nero-like diversions of his carnival ; the tears 
of widowhood, the nectar of his midnight revels ; and the 
groans of orphanage, the paeans of his guilty triumphs. On 
a page livid with the cankering mould of ignominious death, 
be writes, Draco-like, the history of his exploits in letters of 



86 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

blood, that glare the more frightfully because illumed by 
the Tartarean light of eternal burnings. 

Let us, therefore, gird on the panoply of moral heroism, 
and go out to battle with this fearful foe. Let us plight our 
love of country to the extirpation of a sensual appetite — a 
debasing custom — a damning vice ; and while the scribe of 
heaven is registering our sacred pledge in the great doom 
book of eternity, the hearts of angels will leap responsive to 
the joyous pulsations of our philanthropy. Repudiating, 
like the anchoret Peter, the cloistered hermitage of mere 
personal abstinence, and banding together for the patriotic 
crusade, we shall soon achieve a brilliant victory over the 
crescent bannered Saracens, who have already inaugurated 
the terrific strategy of drawing around us that horrible fire 
circle — the whiskey ring. 



A FOURTH OF JULY ODE FOR SONS OF TEMPERANCE. 



Wiiat flag is that flutters on Freedom's proud height 

Its red, white, and blue, all so gracefully streaming, 
While far o'er the heavens the silvery light 

Of a diamond like star, insulated, is gleaming? 
The tempter but sees, as it floats on the breeze, 
Our motto, and, dropping his chalice, he flees. 
'Tis the Temperance Banner— oh, ne'er be it furled, 
Till the demon of rum shall be banished the world. 

Say, whither go these— haggard victims and wan— 

With forms on which suff 'ring hath graven deep traces ? 
For them hath no sun of relief ever shone ? 

Hath earth ne'er a cordial their sadness that chases ? 
Then whither go these, assailed by disease, 
Their eyes blear and lustreless, trembling their knees ? 
To the Temperance Banner — oh, ne'er be it furled, 
Till the demon of rum shall be banished the world. 

It streams now aloft, as an eagle for flight 

Just ready, and pluming his cloud cleaving pinions : 
Its legend emblazoned in letters of light— 

11 Reform coextensive with Bacchus' dominions : " 
That legend 's, in sooth, the watchword of truth. 
And liberty's slogan to age and to youth. 
'Tis the Temperance Banner— oh, ne'er be it furled, 
Till the demon of rum shall be banished the world. 

Come, join in the war cry, with trumpet like tongue, 

Against the dread evils of sensual error, 
And soon from his throne shall the rum fiend be flung, 
And flee as if flying the thunderbolt's terror. 

Our eye let us cast, while the struggle shall last, 
And e'en when the bugles sound victory's blast, 
On the Temperance Banner— oh, ne'er be it furled, 
Till the demon of rum shall be banished the world. 



88 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

So long as we celebrate Fourth of July, 

And thus of Columbia's age keep the tally, 
While love for the Stars and the Stripes shall burn high, 
Around the grand flag of our Order we'll rally, 
And bless the glad morn, when Love did adorn 
Its Purity bright, of Fidelity born ; 
And the Temperance Banner shall never be furled, 
Till the demon of rum shall be banished the world. 



<g,»tew mtmw\ m$. 



While millions round the festive board 
In freedom's blessings share, 

"Won at the point of valor's sword, 
"We, too, our song prepare, 

To chaunt our country's growing fame, 
Her honor to advance, 

Who gave our Order birth and name- 
Cadets of Temperance. 

Beneath her bannered Stripes and Stars 

With steady step we move, 
And though we wear no battle scars, 

True patriots we'll prove : 
Our watchword shall, on sea and shore, 

Resound through earth's expanse, 
Till rum's dark legions flee before 

Cadets of Temperance. 

When warriors and statesmen, now 

Chief actors on life's stage, 
Shall wear death's chaplet on their brow, 

And live on hist'ry's page, 
The virtues that in them have shone, 

Shall us, their sons, advance, 
And their pure mantles fall upon 

Cadets of Temperance. 

Thus leagued in youth— a noble band- 
By vows in honor made, 

With hopeful heart and upraised hand, 
Wo ask kind Heaven's aid. 

That as henceforth our years progress, 
He may our worth enhance, 

Till all the world shall know and bless 
Cadets of Temperance. 



i MM luMlM mmnwt 



" Touch not, taste not," is our motto- 
Lurks a fiend within the bowl : 

Enter not th> enchanted grotto, 
'Tis the charnel of the soul. 

Lured within the circle magic 
By the syren pleasure's tongue, 

Filled, it proves, with horrors tragic, 
Fraught with death to old and young. 

" Touch not, taste not : " bright and sparkling, 

Though the ruby wine cup foam, 
Fathomless its depths and darkling, 

Where foul demons make their home. 
All illusive is the beaming 

By it shed along life's path ; 
Fatal as the lightning's gleaming, 

Lurid with a tenfold wrath. 

" Touch not, taste not : " 'tis a chalice 

Mingled by deceptive art, 
Boiling o'er with hell's own malice, 

Spreading venom through the heart. 
Form with us, youths, alliance 

On our Nation's Jubilee : 
Bid the tempter stern defiance— 

" Touch not, taste not," and be free I 



Vital $tafiftia df Scmpmnre: 

AN ESSAY ON LONGEVITY. 



Certain conditions of the animal economy have been 
considered by otherwise very intelligent and good men as 
indicating, on principles of sound philosophy, the employ- 
ment of alcoholic liquors either as dietetic or therapeutic 
agents; and imaginary benefits attributed to their use have 
induced that hostile stand against the cause of total absti- 
nence, taken, not only in England, but also in this country, 
by professional men who aspire to the honorable rank of 
philosophers. 

Thus, from the evidence submitted, in 1867, to the 
legislature of Massachusetts, we learn that Bishop Eastburn, 
Rev. Dr. Worcester, and others, condemn prohibitory 
liquor laws on purely moral grounds — morality, in their 
judgment, not having advanced, but the vice of intemperance, 
on the contrary, having increased and extended since such 
enactments became part and parcel of our legal codes; and, 
while Prof. Agassiz follows, on general grounds of social 
science,, in the same path, Dr. Clarke says that, in some 
cases, alcoholic drinks lengthen the term of life by checking 
the change of tissue; Prof. Jackson testifies to their value 
in pulmonic disease; Prof. Horsford says they act like food, 
supplying and preserving the tissues; Dr. White, of Har- 
vard University, considers them as assimilating with the 
system, and acting as stimulants and reconstructants; Dr. 
Holmes also believes in their dietetic and medicinal agency; 



92 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

and Dr. Bigelow regards them as deleterious only when used 
in excess. 

It is not the design of the present paper to discuss the 
moral aspect of this question, which, with all due deference to 
the learned divines whose position on the subject has been 
referred to, is so satisfactorily settled in the estimation of 
community in general by the palpable results of excise 
and prohibitory legislation, wherever fairly tested before 
an uncorrupted and incorruptible judiciary, that even the 
vilest member of the odious whiskey ring, and the most 
mercenary advocate of the liquor traffic, dare not risk the 
success of their unholy cause on the moral effects of such 
legislation. We here propose, however, to give some atten- 
tion to the physiological features of the subject, by directly 
appealing to the vital statistics of temperance. 

Dr. Hammond — an author of no mean repute, since his 
work is favorably quoted by the Westminster Review — 
concluded, from the results of experimental research, that 
alcohol arrests the metamorphosis of tissue, that is, the 
process of life by which the annual organism is at length 
disqualified for performing the vital functions: hence, that 
where the organic tissues are wearing away, without food 
sufficient in quantity or quality to repair the waste, or 
where intellectual tension or protracted anxiety subjects 
the sensorial fluid to exhaustive draughts, the arrest of this 
metamorphic process by anaesthetic agents is indicated. 
Vital statistics, however, do not sustain the deduction of 
Dr. Hammond, inasmuch as all the noted cases of prolonged 
endurance under exhaustion from famine, prostrating toil, 
or intense cold, have occurred among those who observed 
habits of total abstinence from spirituous liquors; while 
such as freely used alcoholic stimulants as ordinary bever- 
ages, have invariably fallen the first victims of starvation, 
fatigue, or exposure. 



VITAL STATISTICS 01 Ti mii.kancE. 98 

(hound, indeed, there may be for apprehension that the 
researches of Dr. Hammond were instituted, not so much 
for the purpose of deducing a correct theory of the physio- 
logical action of alcohol from scientific facts, as for that of 
substantiating the alimentary philosophy of Liebig, who 
regarded the process by which food is converted into nutri- 
ment as simply one of combustion, the fuel being supplied 
by tho food ; and whose inconsequent deduction from the 
eminently combustible nature of alcohol was, that it must 
be specially apt to be converted into w r ater and carbonic 
acid b} r the same process of combustion as other articles of 
diet subjected to the action of the digestive organs. Pro- 
ceeding on this assumption, it was quite naturally supposed 
that, in the more northerly regions of the globe, where the 
human system requires a vast amount of carbon to supply 
the expenditure induced by the frigorific forces of the cli- 
mate, and where the dwarfed inhabitants devour with 
avidity large quantities of oil, blubber, candles, lard, and 
other unctuous animal products to furnish that supply of 
carbon, there alcoholic liquors would prove of great alimen- 
tary value in generating such an amount of animal heat as 
becomes necessary to withstand the rigor of those high 
latitudes. 

Seizing this idea, Duchek attempted to prove, by a series of 
experiments, that alcohol, passing into the circulation, suffers 
several changes, and is finally appropriated by the assimi- 
lative functions to the purposes of nutrition, in the form of 
carbonic acid and water ; but this grossly fallacious precon- 
ception of the alimentary value of alcohol, based upon its 
highly combustive quality, is utterly exploded by the very 
efficient and satisfactory experiments of three eminent 
French physiologists — MM. Lallemand, Pcrrin and Leroy 
— which establish the fact beyond possible refutation, that 
alcohol, whether employed for dietetic or medicinal ends, 
never undergoes the process of digestion. In their valua- 



94 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

ble work " Da Bole de VAlcool" these learned authors say : 
" It undergoes no combustion in the living body, but the 
whole of what is injected is excreted unchanged ; so that 
this substance has no claim whatever to rank among articles 
of food, but must be placed in the category of those med- 
icinal or toxic agents, whose presence in the living body 
exerts an important influence on its functions, though they 
do not enter into combination with any of its components : " 
in other words, it is neither more nor less than a direct 
poison, which irritates every tissue of the animal economy 
with which it comes in contact ; and, until finally elimin- 
ated from the system, it is driven by the conservative power 
of nature from organ to organ, causing, every where it 
temporarily finds lodgment, greater or less functional de- 
rangement. 

Although, according to the observation of these eminent 
chemists, alcohol seems to exhibit a preference, somewhat 
akin to elective affinity, for the brain and liver, as grand 
focal points for accumulation, yet its passage, by means of 
the blood current, into all the tissues of the human organism, 
has been distinctly traced by them : nevertheless, through- 
out its entire course, it persistently refuses to enter chem- 
ically into the homogeneity of that vital fluid which is the 
medium of its transmission to every part of the body. Amid 
all the wonderful changes wrought in the blood itself by 
animal chemistry, in the process of assimilation and elimin- 
ation, no decomposition of the elementary constituents of 
alcohol is effected ; and the time required for its removal 
from the sanguiferous system is directly proportionate to 
the quantity originally introduced. The length of time it 
may remain in the system without modification, is shown 
in the circumstance that it was found in the brain, liver and 
blood of a vigorous man, w T hose death was induced by al- 
coholic poison thirty-two hours after drinking a bottle of 



VITAL statistic OF TEMPERANCE. ( .)5 

brandy, notwithstanding the prompt administration of 

emetics and other remedial agents. 

The egregious fallacy of the theory wliich predicates of 
intoxicant liquors nutrient qualities, is further demonstrated 
by the experiments under discussion, in substantiating the 
physiological fact, that, floating on the surface of blood 
drawn from animals in a state of intoxication, may be dis- 
cerned, even by the naked eye, as so many brilliant points, 
distinct globules of fat. Considered in connection with 
the progressive degeneration of the blood and organic 
tissues, in habitual drinkers of spirituous liquors, by substi- 
tution of fatty matter for their normal constituents, this 
fact clearly elucidates the counteraction of the nutritive 
office of the sanguineous fluid by the habitual use of alco- 
holic beverages. 

Moreover, the physiological effects of chloroform, ether, 
amelyne, and alcohol, are all, when administered in large 
doses, essentially the same, as exemplified by the experi- 
ments of these French scientists ; and no more or stronger 
evidence of the utilization, in the animal economy, of the 
last named can be produced, than of the three previously 
mentioned. As before stated, the chief organs on which 
alcohol immediately expends its power when introduced 
into the living body, are the brain and liver ; and this dif- 
ference alone is observable, that the action of chloroform 
and ether on the brain is more rapid, but these agents being 
more volatile, nature succeeds in their quicker elimination 
from the general system : yet hi the volume cited, our Gal- 
lican authorities agree in the unequivocal declaration : 
"From no definition that can be framed of a poison, which 
should include those more powerful anaesthetic agents whose 
poisonous character has been unfortunately too clearly 
manifested, can alcohol be shut out." 

When we read of the 60,000 or 70,000 drunkards whose 
deaths annually swell our bills of mortality, we are too apt 



96 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

to lay aside the saddening record with no vivid conception 
of the facts involved. The unreflecting quite often assume, 
that, although hi temperance does enervate the system, and 
render it more obnoxious to the ravages of fatal disease, 
yet this vast multitude yearly passes away to the silent city 
of the dead hi the ordinary course of nature, without re- 
cognizing, to its legitimate extent, intemperance itself as a 
direct, proximate cause of such mortality. 

I am aw T are that very many of the deaths traceable to 
ardent spirits, may with propriety be attributed to the 
poisonous ingredients added in the process of distillation 
for the purpose of increasing either the yield or the strength 
of the product. Thus, it is well known that strychnine is 
employed in the distillation of whiskey from the juice of 
corn; and chemical analysis demonstrates the presence of 
nux vomica in cognac brandy : but thanks to the progressive 
researches of modern science, and the light thereby shed 
upon the interests of humanity, we are not left either to 
conjecture the physical properties of intoxicating liquors 
from their visible effects, alone, upon the human system, nor 
to charge their baleful action upon animal life to the nefari- 
ous admixture of known poisons with malted grain, or 
fermenting fruit juice : we have been enabled, in addition, 
to discover thereby that chemical principle which consti- 
tutes their inherent poisonous essence. 

Accordant with the experiments just noted are those of 
Prof. Mapes with various popular kinds of confections, 
such as the banana, Jargonelle pear, and other drops. His 
decided conviction is that they are all deleterious to health; 
and he informs us, that "many, if not all of these drops are 
flavored with the hydrated oxyde of amyle, known in our 
pharmacopoeias as fusil oil, combined with nitric, acetic, or 
citric acid." Now, this very poison, he says, is produced hi 
the distillation of whiskey from corn, and, in all probability, 



VITA1 STATISTICS OF TEMPERANCE. '.)? 

stitutee the destructive principle of every kind of ardent 
spirits. 

It were here a pertinent inquiry, While this pernicious 
principle is thus prostrating the vital energy and crippling 
the recuperative power of the physical organs, do the intel- 
lectual faculties pass unscathed the fiery ordeal to which 
they are subjected by the habitual use of intoxicants ? Alas, 
that Dr. Pearson should furnish a sorrowful answer to the 
question in the statement, that "the love of strong drink 
and the proneness to mania are interchangeable causes of 
insanity " ; and that another eminent pathologist, of exten- 
sive experience on the subject, should have ground for the 
declaration, that, hi his judgment, more than half the cases 
of insanity occurring within his observation, were either 
directly or indirectly occasioned by intoxicating liquors : 
more saddening still, that hospital statistics should bear 
them both out hi then professional convictions. Of 286 
insane inmates of one asylum, 115 were deprived of reason 
by strong chink ; and of 495 patients in another, 257 be- 
came insane, according to the testimony of then own 
friends, from the t same cause. The joint number in both 
institutions was 781 ; and the cases clearly traceable to 
spirituous liquors amounted to 372, or within about 18 of half 
the whole number : and if we take into the doleful account 
that many of the remaining cases were, hi the opinion of 
attendant physicians, quite as justly attributable to the 
same cause, although concealed by relatives and friends 
smarting under the stigma, it is not too large an estimate 
to regard the rice of intemperance as producing even more 
than a full half of all the cases of insanity occurring 
around us. 

Philanthropy, therefore, claims our efforts on behalf of 
the temperance cause on the twofold ground, first, that 
dram drinking devigorates the constitution, and secondly, 
that abstinent habits conduce to longevity. 



98 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

In illustration of the first physiological fact, suffer me 
here to educe an example from the statistics of beer drink- 
ing — generally, however mistakenly, considered the least 
deleterious of all modes of using inebriating liquors as a 
beverage. Out of 23.000.000 of bricks made hi 1841, the 
average per man made in the season by beer drinkers was 
760.269, while the average per man of the strictly abstinent 
workmen was 795.400 ; which is a personal average of 
35.131 in favor of the latter class. The highest number 
made by any one drinker of beer was 880.000 : the highest 
number made by any one temperance man was 890.000 ; 
being 10.000 hi favor of the temperance man. Again ; the 
lowest number made by any beer drinker was 659.000 : the 
lowest number made by any temperate workman was 
746.000 ; making 87.000 in favor of the temperate workman. 
Thus, in whatever point of light we view the use of intox- 
icating beverages, we find them, even in then- least'inebriat- 
ing form, positively detrimental to the physicial powers. 

Should further evidence on this head be required, that of 
eminent physicians is at hand. "Medical men," says Dr. 
Gordon, "are familiar with the fact, that beer drinkers, in 
London, can scarcely scratch then* fingers without risk of 
their lives. A copious . London beer drinker is one vital 
part. He wears his heart on his sleeve : bare to a death 
wound from a rusty nail, or the claw of a cat." Sir Astley 
Cooper, on one occasion, was called to a drayman of this 
class, who had received an injury in his finger from a small 
fragment of stone, and suppuration had taken place. This 
distinguished surgeon opened the small abscess with his 
lancet. On returning home, he discovered that he had 
forgotten his lancet case: going back for it, he found his 
patient in a dying condition. "Every medical man in Lon- 
don," says Sir Astley, "dreads, above all things, a beer 
drinker for a patient." 



VITAL STATISTICS OF TEMPERANCE. 09 

Our Becond proposition— Unit temperance is directly 
conducive to longevity— is amply confirmed by incontro- 
vertible facts deduced from medical statistics kept at 
Geneva. From these we learn that, in the latter part of 
the sixteenth century, one half of all that were born died 
under live years of age; and that the average longevity was 
but 18 years. In the seventeenth century, one half died 
under 12. The first sixty years of the eighteenth century, 
one half lived over 27 years; and in the last forty years of 
that century, one half exceeded 32 years of age. At the 
beginning of the present century, one half lived over 40 
years; while from 1838 to 1845, one half exceeded 43 
years. Thus, the average longevity, at these successive 
peiiods, has been extended from 18 years in the sixteenth, 
to 43.7 hi the middle of the nineteenth century. Such an 
improvement in the duration of human life in this country, 
with our population, is equivalent to a diminution in our 
bills of mortality of upward of half a million yearly; or at 
a rate of decrease of more than 1500 deaths daily. 

Now, although Prof. Buchannan and other distinguished 
writers attribute the progressive increase of longevity to 
the advancement of medical science, yet it is susceptible 
of proof that this, w T ith kindred physicial meliorations hi 
the condition of mankind, is a legitimate result of the tem- 
perance movement. The idea may be novel, but that it is 
correct, is demonstrated by three prominent facts. 

First : the commencement of this improvement in the term 
of human life was cotemporaneous with the origin of tem- 
perance societies, and its progress has been correspondent 
to the prevalence of temperance principles. Be it remem- 
bered, just here, that, while in the sixteenth century, 
according to the Genevan statistics, one half of all that 
were born died under five years of age, one half, in the 
seventeenth century — that in the close of which Germany 
first paved the way for temperance organizations — attained 



100 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

nearly the age of 12 years; and that, in the first half of the 
eighteenth century — the very era of Oglethorpe's prohibitory 
proclamation in Georgia — one half of the population lived 
over 27 years. It is also worthy of remark in this connec- 
tion, that the average longevity has ever since been steadily 
increasing, until, in the early part of the present century, it 
had reached the point of 40 years; and that, from 1838 to 
1845, during which period the most systematic, persistent, 
and efficient measures for propagating the principles, and 
cultivating the practice of abstinence, were instituted by 
the organization of the Sons of Temperance and affiliated 
orders, the longevity of the human race attained its maxi- 
mum average, as far as yet developed by tabulated records 
of mortality — namely, 43.7 years. 

Secondly : the average longevity has increased in inverse 
ratio to the consumption of intoxicating liquors : in other 
words, the mean duration of human life has been extended 
hi proportion as the general consumption of intoxicants 
has diminished. Elaborate tables relating to the wine trade 
disclose the important fact, that the actual consumption of 
wine in Great Britain in 1850, wa§ only 34.013 gallons 
more than in 1788, notwithstanding the population had 
more than doubled itself in the interval. In 1788, the 
population was 13.000.000 ; and the consumption at that 
period was 6.650.644 gallons, or a little in excess of half a 
gallon to each individual : in 1850, the population w T as about 
29.000.000 ; and the consumption was 6.684.657 gallons, or 
somewhat less than a single quart to each person. So, in 
the United States, a similar fact is observable. In 1836, 
the aggregate quantity of spirits, wane and beer consumed was 
623.000.000 gallons, and in 1850, it was 583.000.000 gallons ; 
being a diminution of no less than 40.000.000. Now, had 
the population of 1849-50 drunk of these liquors the same 
quantity, per head, as that of 1835-36, there would then 
have been an increase in the consumption of 100.000,000, 



VITAL STATISTICS OF TEMPERANCE. 101 

instead of a decrease of -10.000.000 ; showing the actual 
diminution of consumption, taking the increment of popu- 
lation into account, to have been 1-10.000.000 gallons, or 
over one fifth of the whole quantity consumed in 1S50. 
These (beneficial results, be it observed, were attained dur- 
ing the most successful operations of temperance societies, 
and at the precise period when human life reached the 
highest point in the scale of longevity ever theretofore 
touched. 

Thirdly : the elevating influence of temperance organiza- 
tions upon the average longevity of mankind, is amply elu- 
cidated by the rates of mortality developed in the annals of 
insurance companies. At the age of 40 years, the annual 
rate of mortality for the whole population of England is 
about 13 per 1000 ; and the average mortality for all ages 
between 15 and 70 is about 20 per 1000. According to the 
records of life insurance offices, the rate of mortality at the 
age of 40 is about 11 per 1000 ; and among those insured 
in friendly societies, it is about 10 per 1000. In the Tem- 
perance Provident Institution, with several lives insured 
above 70 years of age, the average mortality in eight years 
for all ages over 15 was only 6 per 1000. Here, then, is a 
net gain of -10 per cent, in longevity as enhanced by the 
progress of temperance ; the relation of abstinent habits to 
long life, as that of cause to effect, being clearly exhibited 
by careful estimates made by an English life insurance 
company, in which it is shown that out of 357 who died of 
drunkenness, there would have been, according to the ratio 
of sober mortality, only 110 deaths. It was not merely 
computed, but scientifically demonstrated, that between the 
ages of 21 and 30 the mortality among drunkards is five 
times greater than among the temperate, while it is twice 
as great between 30 and 50. At the age of 20, the intem- 
perate man may expect to live 15 years longer, and the 
sober man 44 : at 30. the former may calculate on 1P> years 



102 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

more of life, and the latter on 36 : at 40, the drunkard can 
expect to live but 11 years longer, while the man of tem- 
perate habits may reasonably hope for 28 years more. All 
these figures, therefore, establish beyond controversy the 
meliorating power of total abstinence in lengthening the 
term of human life. 



A SPECTACLE OF THE DEATH CHAMBER. 



The poor, outcast inebriate I've marked, 
Whose sateless thirst hath made him devotee 
At Bacchus' vine draped shrine ; and wondered oft 
How man, with God like faculties endowed, 
Below the level ev'n of brutes could thus 
Himself debase. The brute, by instinct taught, 
The baneful plant unerringly avoids ; 
But he, of reason proudly boasting, drinks 
A venom deadly as the hemlock draught 
Of Socrates, or still more potent cup 
Commingled by Toffana's hellish art, 
And by the bawds of Roman brothels used 
To wreak foul vengeance on their paramours, 
When lust was sated and the purse left void. 
Strange suicidal phantasy, that drives 
The phrensied sot in vain the exorcism 
To seek of demons fell, which populate 
His Erebean world of fancy dread, 
By quaffing that Locustan bowl, whence sprang 
The self-invoked Eumcnides he fears. 

One glass another craves, and that a third : 
And so augmentive is the appetence, 
That scores alone can his potations count ; 
Until, presenting but the wreck of self, 
A dull vacuity his mind o'ershades, 
As growing film at length will sight obscure. 
A morbid nervousness, first strangely felt, 
Then in the tremor of his hand next seen, 
Upon his senses loud the tocsin sounds. 
Convulsions frightful in their turn succeed : 
Engorged becomes his burning eyeball, while 
With dropsical effusions soon he bloats. 
His deeply cankered Btomach next inflames, 



104 TEMPERANCE LEAELETS. 

As also doth his ruin steamed brain, in which 
A liquid flows resembling vapor back 
Into its fluid form again condensed, 
Emitting alcoholic odor foul, 
And burning with a lambent flame of blue. 

In mind, in morals, and in manhood, all, 
Bankrupt become, his raging appetite 
For drink, sole sense now left him from the wreck- 
At least, the despot which all else obey— 
Day after day the fuming chalice drains, 
As feeds the grave worm on the fest'ring corpse, 
Whose foul putrescence first evolved its life. 
At length the noble fabric built by G-od, 
The image and the temple of himself. 
As low in smould'ring ruins lies, as erst 
The fated walls of proud Jerusalem 
Beneath the ploughshare of avenging Rome. 



Oh, what a spectacle for pity's eye! 
The scattered fragments of a being late 
With form, with intellect, with hopes endowed, 
Than angels' only less, now strewn around 
In dire confusion, horrible to view 
As was the scene at Avondale's black mouth, 
When, from the debris of her riven shaft, 
The jellied mass of mangled miners, torn, 
As by the force of nitro-glyeerine, 
Beyond the loving cognizance of wives 
Or mothers, was exhumed ! Yet, oh, the sight 
Of soul and body's sunderance by rum, 
Who may describe ? 

The fearful agony 
That wrings the dying drunkard's writhing frame, 
While fell remorse upon his conscience preys, 
Is kin to pangs eternal burnings cause, 
When wrath divine to dread Gehenna dooms. 
As doth the camel, when Harmattan fierce 
Across Arabia's arid desert sweeps, 
Its nostrils bury in the scorching sand, 
So in the pillow deep his face he thrusts, 
As if he deemed, the hunted ostrich like, 
His eyes once hidden he is all secure 
From demons fell that prowl around his bed. 
He vainly for repentance craves one hour ; 
But Atropos stands firm in her resolve 
The o'erstrained thread of ill spent life to cut. 

Ah, little thought he when, in years gone by. 
Long nights he passed in foul dcbaueherv. 



THE DRUNKABD's LEGACIES. 10. r 

That Time, as day by revolve-, Prom out 
His single forelock sheds, for evermore, 

Another and another silver hair; 
So that could we, with Footsteps tardigrade, 
O'ertake him in his flight, our feeble hold 
I'pon him must be, tlicreforc, less. 



If, midst the archives of the past, we could 
The musty tome of Charon find, wherein 
Tho blood recorded list of those he keeps, 
Whose spirits to the beach of Styx have been 
By rum's destructive pow'r despatched, it would, 
Like the apocalyptic host on high 
Before the Patmian exile marshaled erst, 
Innumerable prove. Could wo but drag, 
Despite old Pluto's frown, from Tartarus 
The culprits, who, by this one fiend alone, 
Have prematurely to its flames been giv'n, 
Their charring bones, together piled, would build 
A monument the heavens would astound. 
And terrify the earth. Could we uncork 
The bottled tears of rum made widows lone, 
Of childless mothers, and of orphans sad, 
O'er forms unshrived of once loved husbands, sons. 
And fathers shed, and in one sea collect, 
Forthwith a Bosphorus would flow, in which 
Might freely swim the herd of living sots. 
Or could the dying send their death shrieks up. 
From reeking rum holes and gin palaces, 
Almshouses, hospitals, and prisons cells, 
In one tremendous peal upon our ears, 
Like crashing thunder of the storm king's voice, 
Or throe of a dissolving universe, 
Would sound that peal. 

And such, Rumseller, such 
The Borgian cup wherewith thou fain wouldst lure 
To folly, crime, and death poor silly man. 
But, ah, its contents, like the little book 
To John the angel gave to eat, are in 
The mouth as honey, in the belly gall ! 
Has, then, thy bosom of humanity 
Xo spark remaining? Is the sacred flame, 
By Deity himself enkindled, quenched ? 
Say, wouldst thou, with alchymic art, to gold 
All that thine itching palm may touch transform ? 
Wouldst disembowel earth, or 'ncath the sands 
Of Arimaspus, with thy fingernails, 
Its gold paved caverns dig, for more to heap 
Thy vaults, now running o'er ? Beware, lest like 



106 TEMPERANCE LEAFLETS. 

Hippomenes, when, in the life pledged race 
AVith Atalanta, he with golden apples won 
The prize— herself— stern Plutus should at last, 
By dint of pouring pelf upon thee, pass 
Thee in the flight, and seize thy guilty soul 
As guerdon earned. Oh, from the tortoise shell 
Of selfishness thy spirit disencase, 
And wisely learn the righteous gain of wealth. 
If deaf to widow's groan and orphan's sob, 
Yet list yon voices from th' eternal world. 
The living pray thee, and the dying mock : 
But, hark, the lost with woeful howlings curse ! 
Death, as his younger brother, bids thee, hail ! 
And Satan greets thee as his great high priest, 
Upon his Moloch altar off 'ring, not 
The holocaust of bleeding beast or bird, 
But, ah, the soul of thine own fellow, man ! 

Thy cruel calling laid my subject low. 
Dread vice, her manchineel dipt weapon, like 
Th' assassin Joab, when to Hebron's gate 
He forth led unsuspecting Abner, well 
Concealed : and as she struck the fatal blow, 
The dying drunkard turned him to the wall, 
And breathed his will : these all the legacies 
He could bequeath : 

' ; Society I leave 
A dark example of pollution foul : 
My parents fond, such weight of crushing woe . 
As must bring down in sorrow to the grave 
Their frosted heads : my brothers, in their prime, 
And gentle sisters, too, what deep disgrace 
To them enures from my e'er reckless course : 
My loving wife, whom once it was my pride— 
My highest earthly joy— to call mine own, 
But whom I have, for years, neglect returned 
For love, a broken heart, a blighted life, 
And premature descent into the tomb : 
My tender children— ah, how can my lips 
That name pronounce ?— a reputation low, 
Dark ignorance, chill poverty, and shame 
A loathsome sot their father to confess. 
To grave worms, eager to begin their feast, 
Hereby my fest'ring carcase I resign, 
With knowledge full that few the number is. 
Who in my hurried obsequies will join ; 
While friendship's footsteps ne'er shall softly press 
The wild, dank grass above my crumbling bones, 
Nor fond affection rear a monument 
To mark where they shall lay me : save, perchance. 



iiii: DBUNKABd's LEOA( DES. 107 

lemn warning to the rising rare, 

A mammoth bottle, of black marble scalped, 
And this Bad Legend bearing on each face. 

In blood red characters. 'The Drunkard's Ekd.' 

My rum dyed spirit to Abaddon's hate, 
As rightful prey, I yield." 

He spoke, and died. 
Forth from the dismal room,. with reeling brain 
And stagg'ring step, as if its very air 
Had rendered me intoxicate, I sped, 
To muse in sorrow on his fearful fate. 



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